Institutionalized

Working on the inside changes the way you see the outside. When I did "Phase One," the security training you need to work in a prison, one of the sergeant's warned us about getting institutionalized. I thought this meant always having to sit with your back to the wall in a restaurant. What institutionalization has come to mean to me is having the outside world remind me of the inside world. This can come in the form of seeing someone in public who looks like one of my inmates, or behaves like one of my inmates. Sometimes when I see women in public exhibiting certain behavior I say to myself: "future inmate of America over there." I only have this response to women, men can act ghetto, sleazy, or out of control and I don't start to see them as inmates.

I had a strange experience with the movie "Breakfast a Tiffany's" recently. Many women are charmed by the Holly Golightly character. I remember being charmed by her when I watched the movie as a teenager. I recently re-watched the movie and had a whole different institutionalized reaction.

The Holly Golightly character now resonates for me as exhibiting a strong Histrionic personality disorder and some serious inmate behavior. Histrionic Personality Disorder is defined in the DSM IV as a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking, as indicated by at least five of the following:

Uncomfortable if not the center of attention.
Interaction with others in a inappropriate provocative or seductive manner.
Shallow and rapid changing of emotion.
Uses appearance to draw attention.
Speech that lacks in detail and excessively impressionistic.
Theatrical, self dramatization, or out of proportion expression of emotion.
Easily influenced, suggestible.
Feels even a sociable relationship is intimate.

Forget booze and 50 dollars to go to the powder room. In today's society Golightly would get hooked on extacy and prescription pills. Eventually she'd get caught selling some of her Xanax to buy E. She's the one that will get really pissed when we yank her off of all the psych meds that she was allowed to keep taking at the jail.

Histrionics are pretty common in the prison. One of the best cases was an inmate who went out for an emergency removal of her gallbladder, or cholycystectomy. When she was convalescing in the infirmary before returning to population she would inadequately cover herself in the bed, look at dirty magazines, and dramatically run on and on when I was rounding on her. On the day she left I was just coming to work as they were taking her back to her building. She grabbed me and hugged me. There was nothing I could do to stop it short of pushing her to the ground. In retrospect I probably should have stroked her for that, or at least said something. Security did nothing, I'm not sure if they noticed.

Addendum: that's my back dressed in kimono on today's random blog photo. When we were in Japan we had lunch with a woman who teaches kimono dressing for a living. She strapped, wrapped, and bound me into that thing. It was a complicated, many-layered process.