About 20 years ago I worked as a counselor in jail in Colorado. The facility I worked in was what is called a "work release" center - which means it is an unlocked facility and the prisoners could come and go each day to work and school. It was mostly for inmates who were finishing up their prison sentences and needed about 6 months to adjust to life on the outside, make some money, etc...
I worked the midnight shift. It was a cool job - dead of Colorado winter - three feet of snow outside my windows - and working the graveyard shift for the most part the guys (I never really felt comfortable calling them 'the inmates') were in bed asleep. I could sit and read most of the night.
We had one inmate come to the facility. He was a lot older than the average. Most guys were 18-30. He was 72. I checked his 'offense' when I signed him in. He had gotten 8 months for stealing a loaf of bread and a pair of tennis shoes. That seemed like an awfully stiff sentence for such a petty crime, so that night after I'd placed him in his room and he had gone to bed I sat down and read through his full file.
His rap sheet went back more than 60 years - and the amount of jail and prison time he had served during that 60 was staggering. I honestly think if you added it all up he hadn't had more than 5-6 years on the outside in all that time - but oddly - all of the crimes he served sentences for were very minor stuff - a series of petty thefts mostly - never any violence - never any drug or alcohol offenses - and it always seemed that almost as soon as he was released for one minor charge he was arrested for another. Finally - there was a pattern of judges just getting sick of him and repeatedly sentencing him to jail time again and again and again.
What made the least sense about the whole thing was looking at it all on paper - it looked like he went out of his way to get caught. He never ran. He never tried to deny charges. He always pled guilty.
I'd seen a couple guys who were what was called "institutionalized" - which basically meant they felt more comfortable in jail than out - so I decided that was this guy's story...
...but then I kept reading.
One counselor about 10 years earlier had actually taken the time to interview the guy and get his life history. You can't say that much of it was eventful after the age of 12 because pretty much all he did was go in and out of jail. The notation that caught my eye was a scribbled note about his 6 year old brother dying when this guy was 10 years old.
Most of the guys in the facility got up at about six in the morning. Part of my job was to set out their breakfast. I used to sit with the guys after my shift and have breakfast and coffee with them - breakfast was usually cereal - but sometimes a couple of the cooler inmates would ask if they could crank up the stove and they would make pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc... for everybody.
This old guy loved pancake and egg breakfasts. It was like if was "home cooking" to him - and on mornings when we had big breakfasts I tried to sit with him. Big breakfasts seemed to warm him up for talking.
I talked to him about the pattern - how he was always in and out of jail - and I told him straight forwardly it looked on paper like he wanted to be in prison. I asked him if he felt better in jail. Was an institution more comfortable for him.
He answered me honestly. He said he was okay with jail, but he liked being free. He talked about the things he liked to do, how he wanted to have a dog, go fishing, but then he ended that breakfast saying, "But I don't never get much of that."
It was a couple weeks later that I got a chance to go digging into his soul again. We were having another one of those lots of snow outside and lots of hot food and coffee inside mornings. I decided to ask about his brother.
He told me when he was a kid (about 1922 I'm guessing) it was his job to be at school an hour early to light the stove so the school house would be warm when the other kids got there. His little brother would always tag along. One morning he got there late and was in a hurry to get the fire going. He took a bucket of kerosene used for lanterns and tried to pour some on the fire. The fire jumped into the bucket. He dropped it - and the kerosene splashed all over his brother. It burned the school house down and his brother died in the fire.
He said at the time his parents didn't blame him. They said it was an accident. He expected to be arrested and put in jail - punished for what he had done - but nobody came to arrest him. Nobody would punish him for causing his brothers death. The sheriff never came. The teacher never blamed him.
But he blamed himself. He said, "I was reckless... just in a damn fool hurry to start a fire and I killed my little brother. He never got a chance to live 'cuz of me."
He stopped eating his food and just looked down at his plate. He wasn't sobbing - but he was shaking slightly - the intense internal pain that is anguish - so deep it clings to a persons bones and only someone who has felt it can see it. Tears went slowly down this 72 year old man's cheeks.
I knew that morning why he had been putting himself in jail for the last 60 years. He wasn't going to jail for stealing bread. He was going to jail because that is where he felt he belonged for killing his brother.
As he sat there and wept he said, "I can still smell my brother burning."
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