The prison milieu tends to reinforce strongly held opinions regarding the intractability of inmates. One thing is clear: feedback from the environment is responded to not by learning, but rather a single-minded focus - remaining in control and command, "one-up" on others. Accompanying this focus of attention is another: the need to remain ever more vigilant against treachery by those whose whose obedience one has compelled.

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The term "shadow" was first used by Carl G. Jung to describe the repressed or denied parts of the Self:

"The shadow is the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide. [The shadow] also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc."

Robert Bly offers an image of: "throwing unacceptable qualities over our shoulder into a bag, which we've been dragging around behind us ever since."

Our shadows are all those parts we have split off or denied - the facets of ourselves we are afraid to show - even to ourselves. As long as they remain in this "twilight condition" we are unable accept and own them; consequently, they have no way to offer to us the gifts they secretly possess.

Generally speaking, the shadow has two major functions. First, it is a storehouse for traits that we do not wish to own. Secondly, the shadow acts as a film projector, allowing us to perceive our fears and imperfections outside of ourselves by "transferring" them onto people in the external world.

Thus, criminals tend to be seen as "them" not "us." The well-hidden penal system is where we house these outcasts. But what about the system itself? "Security" functions as a catch-all term for keeping nosy reporters, politicians, and interested persons from discovering what is going on behind the razor-wire fences. Yet, some of us have worked in this system and seen the realities for ourselves. It is not merely that prison serves to "neutralize" the downward spiral of the offender (meeting it with, so to speak, "an equal and opposite reaction," involving remorse); that in itself could be seen as a reasonable initial goal.

The reality is that the policies that perpetuate this system allow prison to be an occasion for the destruction of the human spirit. This can be clearly recognized in the "degradation ceremony." No longer involving physical punishment, these means involve evocation of shame, more accurately termed "toxic shame."

To bring this process to light we turn to Dr. James Gilligan's work, which reintroduced a key concept into the public discourse - "the institutional status-degradation ceremony." This term was originally coined by sociologists Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman more than forty years ago in the course of their research, which was devoted to analyzing the dynamics of psychiatric hospitals and other "total institutions." They note the similarity - from a symbolic perspective - of tribal "ceremonial rituals of degradation."

Gilligan takes us inside a typical prison to witness a scene quite reminiscent of those portrayed by Goffman:

"As Garfinkle points out, 'In our society the court and its officers have something like a fair-monopoly over such ceremonies and there they have become an occupational routine.' This occupational routine occurs regularly among prison officers in the admission process for new inmates.

"The central feature of this 'total degradation ceremony' consists of stripping the inmate so that he is naked in front of a group of officers, who then force him [or her] to bend over in the attitude of submission (described as 'presentation' when animals do it), and in addition to spread the cheeks of [their] buttocks so that [their] anal orifice is completely exposed to the group. At that point one of the officers sticks a gloved finger into the man's anus - ostensibly to determine if the man is smuggling drugs into the prison by secreting them there.

"I say 'ostensibly' after having talked with the superintendents of more than one prison and prison mental hospital in the past, that the whole admission ritual, including this part of the ceremony, is consciously and deliberately intended to terrify and humiliate the new inmate or patient, by demonstrating to him the complete and total power the prison or hospital has over him, and to intimidate him into submitting absolutely to the institution and its officers... The symbolism is obvious: it is a digital anal rape. But even before the finger is introduced into the anus, it is a public humiliation. It is a massive assault on and annihilation of manhood.

As ethnologists have long noted... rites of domination and emasculation are not restricted to the human species... [However], men will often kill or assault each other in the struggle to avoid being in a submissive position... [And they tend to] experience an almost bottomless sense of degradation - when they do submit - to the point where effectively, the self has died.

"Garfinkle argues that 'the structural conditions of the status-degradation ceremony correspond to the structural conditions of shame.' But what is the purpose of exposing someone to the maximum possible amount of shame? Garfinkel suggests that such ceremonies serve to affect the ritual destruction of the person denounced. This is our culture's initiation ceremony into the civilization of the damned... the society of dead souls. [Through the] ritual destruction of personality or manhood - the inmate... becomes a non-person or a dead soul."

Gilligan goes on to make an extraordinarily important observation:

"When we cannot fend off, undo, or escape from [a condition of inescapable humiliation]... when we cannot protect ourselves from them, whether by violent or nonviolent means, something gets killed within us - our souls are [in effect] murdered. All this is implicit in the double meaning of the word that most directly and literally refers both to the death of the self, and to what causes the death of the self - 'mortification,' which means both humiliation and causing death."

It is well known that the devastating emotion of shame called "being mortified" can lead to suicide. Feelings of shame are often accompanied by thoughts that one is a failure, inferior, worthless, incompetent, or defective in some fashion. Other ingredients of the shame experience include self-perceptions of weakness, inadequacy, vulnerability, loss of control, helplessness, passivity, despair, disgrace, and unlovability.

I know, from having worked in a few prisons in years past, that for many (but not all) correctional officers, their job provides plenty of opportunity to express cruelty. One example is provoking female inmates on the mental-health unit and then remanding them to solitary confinement, where, in many cases they will be clothed only in a flimsy paper johnny, and kept on "eye-ball watch" - that is, with a correctional officer posted 24/7 outside the window in their door.

A 2008 article in the New York Times states: "Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences."

If the prison functions as a container for those who embody society's shadow - inmates and prison staff - what can we learn about our society itself?

While these repugnant dramas are playing out behind prison walls - where humans are seen as objects, rather than sacred subjects - our greed and indifference have now brought civilization to the edge of destruction.

To put it simply, we are running out of time to unite and deal with problems that will devastate the planet. The reality appears to be that humanity is about to hit an "ecological wall" and an "evolutionary wall." The first emerges when we run into the physical limits of nature to sustain humanity; the second is when we run into ourselves - the limits of our adolescent behavior - and are pushed to turn toward more mature, adult ways of being vis-a-vis living on the planet. This process may take decades - or end in unspeakable tragedy.

We have reached a time of historic transition, which, in the coming years, will be unprecedented in its urgency, scale, and severity. What can be predicted is that we will confront a series of accelerating crises, including increasing climate disruption, spreading regions of water scarcity, declining agricultural productivity, growing inequality of wealth and well-being, rising numbers of climate refugees, spreading extinction of plant and animal species, overbearing impersonal bureaucratic systems, nuclear weapons, radioactive waste, and mendacious government agendas. These and more make up the "shadow" we refuse to think about, not to mention, take responsibility for.

In addition, there are inter-retroactions between the different problems, crises, and threats, such that we can accurately name the situation in its totality as "a poly-crisis." Beyond this, is the issue of runaway positive feedback. As Edgar Morin states,

"The question now becomes whether we have crossed a critical threshold in the process of acceleration/amplification that could lead to an explosion or implosion involving any number of deadly global threats."

The pollution of our environment is unsustainable. Our agricultural techniques are unsustainable. Our fossil-fuel consumption is unsustainable. Our consumption of raw materials and production of toxic waste are unsustainable. Our consumption of psychiatric drugs is unsustainable. Our population growth is unsustainable.

Our way of life is unsustainable. And many, many human beings are stuck in denial.

We will soon no longer be able to deny our shadow, as it will surround us and threaten all of us with extinction.

We are now, and will continue to be, relentlessly challenged to work on ourselves and transform our very being. We need to find alchemical ways to move from the darkness of ignorance into to the light of awareness, and in the process engage in beneficial action for the world. The consequences of not doing so will be severe.

Through programs like the Prison-Ashram Project, discussed in the last four articles, many prisoners are involved in self-transformation. The question is, will we - in the world at large - become willing to follow suit?

(Article changed on Apr 29, 2021 at 12:25 PM EDT)

Authors Bio:

I work as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on transformational learning - a blend of psychoanalytic and transpersonal approaches, and am the author of Self Actualization and Unselfish Love and co-author of Families Helping Families: Living with Schizophrenia, as well as Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation. My interests and life have taken parallel courses, which together have woven a complex tapestry: spirituality and meditation on the one hand, and political psychology on the other. I have studied and practiced with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Mata Amritanandamayi and Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, and continue a daily practice of meditation. My early political education began with the writings of the founding fathers. Over time this led to involvement in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear movements. I was interested in the powerful molding of prevailing political and economic dynamics by what C. Wright Mills called the military-industrial complex. In time I have come to the conclusion that, despite various interest groups' attempts to minimize or trivialize the concept, the deep state is a reality - decisively and covertly shaping events on both the domestic and international fronts. I am interested in an exceptionally promising alternative source of energy that has yet to see the light of day. I see the current period as a precarious form of initiation rite into the beginning of adulthood for our species, and hope to do whatever I can to help us reach this goal. Meanwhile, I seek daily to recall the reality that the same awareness (the Ever-Present-Origin) looks out through all of our eyes, and actualize this in my relationship with other beings.