Smoking Is the Least of Our Worries : Prisoners: Worrying about the hazards of cigarettes for inmates is like treating a wart when the patient has cancer.
Like most men behind bars, we’re smokers. Like most smokers in America, we’d really, deep down, like to quit. If we could, we would. It’s a nasty habit that may ultimately not only cripple but kill us.
Like many smokers, we’ve tried to quit, several times in fact, only to return under the stress and pressures of life behind bars. Quitting is a bitch, even under the best of circumstances. And our current life situation doesn’t fall into that category.
We know the price of quitting: Two weeks to a month of “uptightness,” followed by a personal determination to stay on the wagon. But the constant demands of a prison jungle, in which the strong survive and the weak suffer abuse or perish, easily convinces us that we’ve much more pressing matters to worry about and deal with.
The prospect of becoming victim to some dreaded disease in the distant future because we smoke is not nearly as frightening as this caged world that poses the more immediate threat to our mental, emotional and physical health. In choosing the lesser of evils, we opt to smoke now and put off the rigors of quitting until later. There’s time--we hope.
Imprisonment is a gross aberration of societal norms. It is an arbitrary, one-sex world without warmth, beauty or softness, devoid of all the social props and psychological crutches that make and keep humans sane and normal. It’s a hard, often cruel, existence underlined by fear, despair and a touch of madness.
Even under the best of conditions, it is a dehumanizing sea of pain and suffering, compounded by anxiety and frustration for both keeper and kept. Haunted by fear of the unknown, the oppressiveness of overcrowding and the specter of violence and homosexual abuse, a cell can become an abode of multiple torments.
In fact, suicide is the leading cause of death in jails, at a rate nine times that of citizens in free society. And that says more than we ever could about the level of stress behind bars, particularly among the newly imprisoned, who must not only cope with the instant trauma of imprisonment but also wrestle with narcotic addiction, psychiatric problems and whatever other personal demons they bring to the situation. To demand that they instantly quit smoking atop all of this is asking a bit much, wouldn’t you think?
It’s heartening to hear of officials who care about the health and welfare of prisoners; that takes more courage than we’ve seen in awhile. But they could help prisoners and society a lot more if they would work to find ways to reduce the tension and dangers of life behind bars and equip inmates with the life skills necessary to be productive citizens. Worrying about the hazards of smoking, given the overall wreckage of their lives, is like treating a wart when the patient has cancer.
Forcing those who live or work behind bars to quit smoking might, admittedly, do us all a favor that we may one day appreciate--if we survive the experience. You don’t have to be a genius to understand that forcing several thousand stressed-out personalities, some violent, to simultaneously break lifelong habits “cold turkey” will inevitably raise the level of irritability and hostility among both inmates and employees. It carries dangerous potential and a more immediate health hazard than smoking. Perhaps an administrator would like the challenge of managing that scenario from the top, but we, on the other hand, would not want to have to cope with it on the bottom.
