Aren’t you afraid or intimidated working with criminals? I would be very tense about it fr
Well, as we say in my country, "there’s all sorts in the Lord’s vineyard," and you can’t lump everyone together in a single assessment. If you ask me about my personal experience —bearing in mind that I mostly interact with common criminals, who are in prison mainly for crimes related to robbery with violence, assault, or drug trafficking and consumption (which often comes hand in hand with violence or aggression)— I would say this: many of them are addicts, and 95% have some serious mental disorder derived from addiction.
That said, the people within this profile are often individuals who entered the world of crime very young, on average between 13 and 18 years old, and in 85% of the cases I’ve handled, this involvement in crime was directly related to drug use. Yes, drug use, in most cases turning into addictive behaviors before the age of 15. And I’m not talking about marijuana, I mean hard drugs like heroin or cocaine in most cases.
So, we’re talking about people who logically (and I can tell you statistically as well) come from environments where consumption was normalized from a very young age, very marginalized environments, with families who were also consumers and/or traffickers, where drug use was normalized, and where crime was simply a means to sustain that use. For example, I have a case where his older brother gave him his first dose of heroin at 13 years old, and this wasn’t unusual in that person’s environment.
We’re talking about people who grew up in slums where not even the police went in, people who grew up in shanty towns, people who didn’t even have a national ID card until they were first arrested, sometimes not even registered before that. In short, people from the margins who grew up normalizing violence, drug use, scarcity, and especially theft as a way of survival, because they had no other option. People who were raised surrounded by constant violence, and therefore reacted violently. People with huge emotional deficits or extremely toxic emotional-affective relationships, where terrible dynamics were normalized as something “normal,” or where abuse was taken as a form of affection and love within family systems.
This leads to a distorted perception of good and evil, or of what love should be and what it shouldn’t be, things that are very difficult, sometimes impossible, to treat because the wounds run so deep, but above all because they form the very foundation of the belief system of adults who already carry such a heavy history on their backs. We’re talking about people who, in many cases, have been sent to psychiatric prison wards where physical restraint is very common, which basically means that when they have an episode, they get beaten up and then tied to a gurney for however long the prison officers feel like. Or people who have suffered serious police abuse inside prison institutions.
These are people who have been crushed by life, who one day decided they wanted to reintegrate, to take the opportunity given to them, and start a very difficult journey because of all the baggage they carry, made even harder by addictions, since addiction doesn’t get “cured,” it gets controlled. And the person has to control it themselves, which makes everything more complex.
What I’ve learned working with this specific profile of people is that if you give them a little bit of kindness and empathy, their response is incredible. Even people with very disruptive personalities and problematic behaviors end up holding affection for those in charge of them (or us, though I like to say it’s the social workers who really do the trench work, basically acting like their mothers lol). Of course, many of them are sly, and they’ll try to trick you, tell you one thing and do another. But at the end of the day, these people are survivors, there are 50-year-olds who you don’t even know how the hell they made it to that age without dying. The reality is, they’ve gotten to where they are by being cheeky, lying, cheating, and hustling with the few tools they’ve had. So it’s normal. You just have to tell them that if they keep going down that road, you’ll send them to hell, and that’s that.
But it’s true that, despite the moments where you want to strangle them—it’s the same as wanting to strangle your teenage kid who keeps getting into trouble—at the end of the day, many of them are stuck cognitively in adolescence or early youth. That’s another reality: you’re talking to people who are childish in some ways, and adults in others, which makes it complicated to manage.
Still, it’s a very rewarding job, because these people really do develop affection for you, even if in a dysfunctional way. They value it because nobody has ever helped them in their damn lives, they’ve been treated horribly, so anyone who lends them a hand, they truly appreciate. Then, of course, they might trick you and behave terribly, but if you get mad at them, at least it affects them xD. But they love you a lot. In my case, for example, they say I’m a bit of a sergeant because I don’t let anything slide. But then, you know, they all pitch in and get you a gift for your birthday with the little they have.
They’re pretty good, not all of them, but most. And the ones who aren’t well, they’ll make you laugh your ass off because of the stories they tell you… dude, sometimes is like wtf man lol
