No snitching. Keep to yourself. Don’t trust people. Mind your own business. These are just some of a long list of understood rules in prison culture, according to Sam Dye, national program director for the InnerChange Freedom Initiative®(IFI), a values-based reentry program developed by and affiliated with Prison Fellowship.
Communicating with and understanding others—even ourselves—is hard enough in the homes and offices of our daily lives. But when you add in the codes of silence and self-protective façade of prison culture, it only gets harder.
Yet, explains Sam, genuine, interpersonal communication “is key to change in community.”
Sam, who has a decade of experience in prison ministry, uses a psychological model called the Johari window to illustrate and facilitate interpersonal relationships and communication with and amongst prisoners.
The Johari window, invented by and named after American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955, is a simple box with four panes. Each pane represents part of the self.
The Public Self
The first pane represents your public self. It is the space where free engagement happens, and it contains information known to you and to others. At a first meeting, the pane of the public self is very small. It contains only basic information, such as your name and your occupation. But as a relationship deepens, the pane grows naturally to include likes, dislikes, feelings, opinions, and personal experiences.
When you first meet a prisoner or ex-prisoner, or when you first begin an in-prison seminar or Bible study, public panes may feel prohibitively small. But be patient! Work to grow the public pane by revealing appropriate, safe information and finding common ground, whether or not the topic seems “spiritual.”
The Hidden Self
The second pane contains private information known to you but hidden from others. As trust builds up in a relationship, you grow comfortable and reveal more of your hidden self. As the hidden pane shrinks, the public pane grows. By sharing, you progress towards increasing degrees of intimacy with another person.
This may seem simple, but prisoners often hit a relational wall. Some come from backgrounds of abuse or abandonment, and others hone an image of invincibility to survive in the tough environment of prison. Still others may present a spiritualized version of themselves more palatable to chaplains and volunteers. Prone toward defensiveness, all three of these groups may avoid disclosing their true selves, thus retarding the growth of relationships with volunteers who intend to help them.
Butch Beckwith, an ex-prisoner who went through the IFI program in Kansas, explains, “I had a hard time trusting anybody because from childhood on I’d been thrown out, pushed away.”
While sharing parts of the hidden self can be difficult, it is vital to the growth of relationships. To help overcome the barriers to self-disclosure, in-prison volunteers and mentors must demonstrate their trustworthiness by keeping promises, facilitating a supportive environment in group settings, and responding to disclosures appropriately and without condemnation. (Note: Volunteers should encourage self-disclosure gently and with respect for privacy. Forced exposure generally causes more harm than good.)
The Unconscious Self
The third pane represents the unconscious self: the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs unknown to you or to others. While below the radar, this veiled quadrant can drive observable behavior. For example, a prisoner may unleash anger towards others without recognizing that his anger originates from a childhood experience of abuse.
Prisoners or ex-prisoners may have large unconscious panes. Joseph Luft observed that “threat tends to decrease awareness,” because people under threat spend less time at self-examination and more time blaming or defending against outsiders. Prisoners or ex-prisoners, used to ducking such threats, may fall into this category and have difficulty accounting for—or changing—the deep motivations and beliefs that drive their actions.
Tony Chantaca, sentenced to 25 years at age 16, only became more hardened during his incarceration, lasting just four months on his first parole. But when he entered the IFI program in Texas, its staff and volunteers helped him understand the roots of his criminal behavior. Large pieces of information were transferred from the unconscious to the hidden or public panes, and his life underwent dramatic change.
You, too, can help prisoners and ex-prisoners uncover information from the unconscious pane. You can use tools that address behavior at the “heart level,” urging inner transformation through a personal relationship with God. (InsideOut Dad® Christian, Inside Journal, and many other tools are available through Prison Fellowship.) You can ask penetrating questions. And you can continue to express support and love for prisoners or ex-prisoners who take a step backward, giving them the freedom to examine—without defensiveness—the reasons behind poor decisions.
Blind Spots
The fourth pane represents the information about you that others can see plainly, even though you can’t. Often our blind spots include not just outright sins, but the gap between our intentions and others’ perceptions. For example, a shy woman who speaks little at groups may unwittingly come across to others as aloof or cold.
We all have these blind spots, large and small, that we fail to recognize. Yet Jesus warns us to remove the plank from our own eye before reaching for the speck in our brother’s eye (Matthew 7:3-4). Before we can help prisoners grow in their own relationships, we must open ourselves to examination by the Holy Spirit and by reliable mentors and friends.
Acknowledging that we have blind spots is not a weakness, but an advantage. It gives us an opportunity to eliminate our blindness and correct behaviors that subvert our intentions to minister effectively to prisoners.
Seeing the Invisible
The Apostle Paul once lamented, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror.” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Effective relationships are the cornerstone of excellent ministry to prisoners, but the difficulty of deeply understanding ourselves or others hampers our ability to relate. As we use tools like the Johari window to disclose our hidden selves, explore unconscious motives, and remove our blind spots, we learn to know ourselves and prisoners more fully—becoming more effective ministers of the Gospel.