Episode #56 of Dr. Jedidiah's Diary: Pete, the Incorrigible

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

 

Episode 56. Pete, the Incorrigible

The day when I first met Peter still remains vivid, raw, sore, and unbearably painful deep inside my memory. It was at the Texas State penitentiary located far away from the southwest farming area. I was working on my paper about the effects of counseling and reforming criminals in a transformation program. Spending a year in Texas, regularly seeing the inmates, was not an easy task. Most of the prisoners there were kept in single cells individually for more than 20 hours a day, which was obviously telling me they were suffering a lot of hard-to-control mental problems or psychological disorders.

 

I was allowed to interview 10 inmates in total, not as a group, but only as one-on-one basis with a prison officer attending in the same space. As might have expected of prisoners kept in the all-solitary unit, each of them had shown me insecure and wayward attitude throughout the interviews. When I told briefly about myself at our first interview, most of them looked the other way or down to avoid my eyes. The first 5 minutes felt like 5 hours, which gave cold sweats down my spine like a novice politician making a speech on the stump. Pete was the very first inmate that looked me in the eye and said “What do you want, doc? Like this place? Haimish enough for me.” I was trying hard to gain back my composure in front of this convict. When I saw him wearing a nasty smirk, I became somewhat mad and strongly determined not to look weak or incompetent as a psychologist before Pete. I needed to remind myself of the jail officer’s words of wisdom: “Doctor J, do not let the inmate get a head start in any circumstance. They are very good at smelling other people’s weakness lickety-split.” Yes, of all, Pete was the one that would never ever grovel to authority, even if he was on death row.

 

Pete had always looked relaxed, whereas the other 9 inmates had looked alert and poised throughout the year-long marathon of interviews. Whenever I asked questions about some moments of deep remorse or regrets in their horrible criminal act in the past, Pete still looked calm and totally unperturbed as if nothing in the world would ever mend his botched relationship with other humans. He said “Hey, you have no idea how many of lives I took out there. Regrets or remorse? Stop wasting your time here, doc. I got no moment of lookback or regrets. They put me here in a single cell, thinking they’re doling out punishment to me. Ha…not a bit. They feed me for free, give me my own space, and tons of time to daydream of killing a passel of people. My grandma used to say “Waesucks! I should kill more dandelions in my yard!!” haha… just like my granny was good at weeding her garden, I am good at killing lives! Well, waesucks! I could have killed more!! I could have!!”

 

Pete was not just the case of transgression or sociopath. He seemed to be born evil. Murdering innocent people had always been some kind of proceleusmatic activity in his life even to the point of his feeling it like all in a day’s work before he ended up in jail. He was never silent until silenced by me or the prison officer. I still haven’t finished the paper that I started a while ago. Bitterly reminiscing Pete’s cold smirk and peaceful eyes, I still have no confidence or am ready to wield the pen to conclude my thoughts about the effects of reforming criminal mind.

 

Expressions

    1.  penitentiary: a prison for people convicted of serious crimes

 

    2.  all-solitary unit: solitary confinement, which is a form of imprisonment distinguished by living in single cells with little or no meaningful contact to other inmates, strict measures to control contraband, and the use of additional security measures and equipment.

3.  wayward: difficult to control or predict because of unusual or perverse behavior

4.  on the stump: engaged in political campaigning

 

    5.  haimish: homelike atmosphere; simple, warm, relaxed, cozy, unpretentious

 

    6.  lickety-split: as quickly as possibly/ immediately

 

    7.  to grovel to/ before someone: to behave humbly or abjectly, as before authority; debase oneself in a servile fashion

 

    8.  to be on death row: to be awaiting execution after being convicted of a capital crime.

 

    9.  look-back: the act of thinking about something in the past in a retrospective manner

 

   10. to dole out punishment: to allocate/ administer/ give punishment

   11. a passel of …: a group of (many)/ a great amount or number of ...

 

   12.   Waesucks!: (Scottish expression) Alas! (used as an exclamation to express sorrow, grief, pity, concern, or apprehension of evil)

 

    13.   proceleusmatic: inciting, encouraging, animating

    14.    to wield the pen: to write one’s thoughts