Later On

In Joshua Foer’s fascinating book about human memory and how it works (or not), Moonwalking with Einstein, he discusses how the operation of memory in some way undermines the efficacy of the current prison model.

The problem is that our memories are strongest in those areas that offered a significant survival advantage during our evolution: memories of faces, routes, and visual images is extraordinarily strong, whereas memories for words and data (Johnnies-come-lately in evolutionary terms) is much weaker—indeed, the memory techniques I have learned so far involve creating (mentally) visual images and placing them along a (remembered) route.

The particular strengths and weaknesses of our memory as evolved are why, for example, that “time flies” when one’s days consist of essentially the same activities: people who work in the same office or cubicle for years, doing work whose sensory input is much the same—papers, reports, desk, meetings, papers, etc.—find that their memories, being so much alike, merge together. When they look back, they don’t feel as though they’ve been doing the job for, say, 20 years—it feels, in memory, like months: the days are just too much alike to trigger separate memories. One may remember this event or that, but overall the time seems to have passed all too quickly.

On the other hand, people who move around, living in one locale at one job for a year or two, then in a different sort of place at a different sort of job for another year or two, and so on, tend to have more vivid and distinct memories—of the year in the jungle vs. the year in the plains vs. the year in the mountains vs. the year on the sea and so on. The settings of the memories (which are carried into memory as well) are distinct, so the memories remain distinct, and, when he looks back, a person with those memories has a sense of a much longer time having been lived than the person in the unchanging environment.

Foer describes, for example, a party thrown by a somewhat recherché English mnenomicist that was specifically designed to be memorable: you entered on hands and knees, crawling through a long tubular tunnel, to emerge in the first party room, waist-deep in balloons. Each room was distinctly different, and as the party progressed, its participants built memories linked to each distinct setting—so that years later, as people recalled that evening, their memories would have lots of setting-specific associations to keep those memories strong and separate—the conversation in the balloon room with Kim and Ted will not be confused with a totally different encounter in the tiger-striped room with the big fireplace, for example: when you recall, you inevitably picture and remember the settings.

So, prison: almost every day spent in prison is more or less the same, in the same environment, doing the same activities. And so, when the prisoner is released, on average after 4.5 years, he looks back, and his time in prison seems brief—it went by before he knew it.

Sure, some markers show how much time has passed: his little boy is now in high school, cellphones are smaller, and so on. But still: in his memory, it was very little time.

I don’t think this is the desired outcome. Those who favor punishment will not like that the punishment, in retrospect, went by quickly. Those who favor rehabilitation also get nothing.

So: the question is how to build the prison experience so that, in memory, it remains big, impressive, and a deterrent? Indeed, should the prison experience simply punish or does it make sense, given that today’s prisoners will indeed be released into communities—over 2.2 million prisoners—to try to use prison time to try rehabilitation?

Save for those facing life sentences or the handful who are executed, prisoners do indeed return to the community. Prisoners in jails are released after 6 or 7 months, and those in prisons are released after—on average—55 months. (Time spent in prison varies by type of crime: the average for violent offenses is 91 months (7.6 years), for drug offenses 47 months (3.9 years), for property offenses 42 months, etc. — with 55 months (4.6 years) as the overall average.)

Thus in 4.6 years, on average, millions of former prisoners return to society, showing the effects of whatever it was they experienced in prison, shaped by their memories of that time. And what sort of memories do we want them to have? That the time whipped by seemingly overnight?

One Platonic dialogue we studied closely in my freshman year of college, and one that deserves rereading, is the Meno—or Menon as it now seems to be called. Meno was a wealthy young man who asked Socrates a pregnant question about the source of virtue: are men virtuous by nature? or do they learn virtue? or do they acquire it in some other way? Socrates then proceeds to question Meno about what he means by “virtue”, and it turns out that he doesn’t really say to what the word refers. (Woody West, a classmate at the time, sort of wished that Socrates had answered “In some other way,” and walked on—but that was when we were trying to translate the dialogue. And Jack de Raat, in our game of dreaming up covers for tawdry paperback editions of the great books, came up with a winner for Meno: a dissolute looking young man in a toga, reclining on a couch with a voluptuous slave or two, with the subtitle “He Didn’t Know What Virtue Meant!!!”)

You can see how my memories work. Sorry for the digressions, but I’ve reach an age at which such things are enjoyable. At any rate, the question Meno asks strikes at the heart of prison purpose: Can virtue be taught? Is rehabilitation possible?

My own belief is that human behavior is shaped by the interaction of genetic endowment and environmental stimuli and opportunities (or lack thereof). So I would think that a well-constructed rehabilitation program, based on what we know now of human behavior and psychology (and memory), could easily produce a bell curve of outcomes, with some who go through it completely untouched, others with their lives transformed, and most with some improvement.

It won’t happen, of course: a large contingent of legislators is focused totally on punishment and suffering as the goal (due, I think, to their own unresolved problems and issues) and another, overlapping, group focuses on program failures: if a program has any failures, then the program must be discarded. This group resists looking at the overall picture because their focus is agenda-driven: they look for failures only in those programs with which they have ideological disagreement, and of course they find some. That’s the nature of bell-curved outcomes.

So nothing will happen. But if something were to happen, what should it be? Knowing what we now know about memory and how it works, how should the prison experience be constructed?