spent a lot of time last night talking about the dehumanizing experience of being imprisoned, and like, I didn't necessarily realize how fucked-up parts of it were until I talked about them out loud with someone? like, you go through something like that, and the experience of going through it normalizes it to some degree.

but then you explain about how the 'school' room had windows, but only to look out on the interior of the prison, and like...

windows were such a big part of the facility. or rather, the absence of them. you had one thin slit roughly the size of a cinder block in your cell, about another person-length up the wall, and it let in some light but not enough to read or do anything by even if it was sunny out, so your sense of time was controlled exclusively by the ceiling lights. your perception of everything was completely defined by the artificiality of the environment.

if you were 'well-behaved,' they gave you recesses in the yard. but the yard was built such that even the facility had an entrance facing a main road, you couldn't SEE the road from the yard due to the way it was fenced-off. this is what 'imprisonment' really is: it's an attempt to control your perception, to make you Feel and Respect the overwhelming authority of the people who run it. this isn't even getting into the casual cruelty or violence I saw.

I spent three months in the detention facility. you can't overstate the feeling of isolation and horror when the cell door closes your first night in and the magnetic lock clangs into place and the lights go out. or realizing this is a building full of children, and that there's a man out there in the hallways with a shotgun every night who could get away with basically anything he wanted if he was of a mind to do so.

I saw kids who started the summer I spent on the inside who were just troubled, twitchy sorts who said the wrong thing or confided in the wrong person get ground down into -actual- violent individuals just by the social pressures of the environment. so any time I hear someone try to talk to me about rehabilitation, it just makes my blood boil. spend a night, a week, a month in one of these places, and try to pretend that it's 'for their own good.'