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Is It Really Barney’s Fault?

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Jane Hall

A wonderful psychologist turned to me one day just after we had been soundly cursed and observed, “I think, Jane Hall, that this is Barney’s fault.” I had never considered such a thing and was taken aback.

You are special, you’re the only one! You’re the only one like you! There isn’t another in the whole wide world who can do the things you do! Cause you are special, special! Everybody’s special; everyone in his or her own way. (Barney’s Birthday Party)

I was certainly glad the cursing kid did not have a twin but I was also very fond of Barney. As my grandchildren’s after work babysitter and then full time Nanny, I spent a lot of time with Barney and I can only say that he was good to me.

The Bible tells us that the very hairs of our head are numbered. Surely each of us is special to God (Kingdom of Heaven, page 103 ). But Cynthia was onto something; these kids had a sense of entitlement that was foreign to earlier generations. Many really believed that they should have the things they wanted just because they wanted them. They lacked concepts of working for something, of saving, of delaying gratification.

Too many years ago, when I was at Peabody, we did multiple studies on improving self concept in children with handicapping conditions. We tried an enormous number of independent variables or treatments. What changed kids’ sense of self? Achievement. In my own dissertation, I was amazed that the highest gains in self concept were among the kids who were most impaired. Intrigued, I started asking them about it. They were still years behind their contemporaries. I’ll never forget; repeatedly, the children looked at me and said things like, “I used to know 10 words; now I know 25.”

My husband worked for awhile at a prison boot camp program. They did PT and marched and went to class. “Are they changed at all-any of them?” A few. “What part changes them?” Like most folk I assumed it would be the constant discipline. The work. “What do you mean?” I asked. These people have never accomplished anything. With us, they paint schools and clean up rivers and camps. They see that something is changed by what they do.

If you study the scriptures, there is not a lot about sitting around waiting to get what you want. True, Jesus did heal many people and brought some back from the dead, but as our deacon said recently, they all ultimately died. And when Jesus healed them, He never told them to just go take it easy.

Work gives our lives meaning.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

Khalil Gibran

What is your work? (Kingdom of Heaven, page 135). I know, I know you’ll get around to the inmate or kid just as soon as you fill out the morning report, catch up the log book, write the DR, gather the witness statements, log in the grievance, make the inmates clean up the mess that set the warden off. I’ve been there. I once sent for a kid whose special education IEP I had just written. “What did you want, ma’am?” he asked with confusion.

“Well, I just wrote your school plan and I wanted to see what you look like. You look pretty good.” I realize how pitiful that is, but we had to have those IEP’s or we’d be out of compliance. I have been where you are and it is not an easy place.

Remember, what you do does matter and in the final analysis, you don’t work for the state.

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Nobody in Atlanta Ever Gets Fired

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Jane Hall

I have been blessed, in my opinion, to have spent my entire professional career on the ground floor (sometimes it felt like the basement). By that I mean I always worked in facilities directly with inmates or kids. I never made it to the regional much less the central office of any agency. Some people probably wondered why I never advanced-I had all the proper credentials. I always assumed that I was never promoted because I could work with the clients. If I weren’t Episcopalian, I’d ask Can I get an amen?

The promoted people in the central office all have classy titles. My personal favorite is the Department of Corrections Risk Reduction Specialists, but every agency had people whose job was to oversee the implementation of programs and ensure compliance. They would come from afar to audit our work. That meant, of course, to look at our paperwork-never at our people. They always found something wrong. If everything were in order why would anybody need them?

In preparing for this blog, I searched the web for writings about corrections. The frustration of facility staff is palpable. They can’t do what they know they need and want to do because their time is eaten up with paperwork. I, and probably you, have stayed up nights filling out papers that had meaning only to an auditor. They were totally irrelevant to daily operations in facilities; they certainly meant nothing to the clients. Paper doesn’t produce progress: people do.

As the economy has sputtered and the numbers of inmates has splashed, budgets have been cut. Where do the Reductions in Force (RIF’s) occur? Not in the central office! ( Kingdom of Heaven, p 86, p164)

After being reprimanded by consultants for failing to prevent a suicide, a colleague came upon a raft of banker boxes being loaded onto trucks. What are those? He naively inquired.

Ten year old client records. What will be done with them?

They’ll be taken to the dump and buried.

In those boxes were the souls of so many staff. All that urgent documentation buried by a bull dozer to protect confidentiality.

If you’re hoping I have answer to all this, quit reading now. Even politicians claimed no solution.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

Ronald Reagan

But if you’re working in a facility, take heart. You’re there because you can work. (If you’re still in an institution because you found a good place to hide, that’s on you.) Remember, in the final analysis, you aren’t working for the state. (Kingdom of Heaven, p 155 ).

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The Phenomenon of the Closed Door

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Jane Hall

I thought I would spend some time organizing and preparing for this first real post. Then it occurred to me that I had certainly never done such a thing before. I began my career in special education in 1969 because I was highly educated and totally untrained-I had no idea how to work at anything but my own education.

My aunts convinced me to call the board of education and ask about vacancies. It was August 27 and school started September 3. There were 6 special ed classes in Calhoun County, Alabama and 5 vacancies. I was so stupid as to tell the principal interviewing me that I had written a paper on Down’s Syndrome. I shall never forget his reply, “Darling, these kids look just like the rest of them; they just don’t act that way.” September 3, I stood in a room with 12 teenage kids. After the man shut the door, they asked, “How long you think you’ll last?” I used that scenario with many groups of student teachers: Don’t get full of yourself. That door will close and it will be you and them.

In 1981, I moved my child and dog to Macon, Georgia. Not only did I know no one in Macon; the only people I knew in Georgia were my Auburn roommates who were in Atlanta. They weren’t much help in Twiggs and Crawford Counties. In 1982, I took a job at Georgia State Prison, My qualifications? I had been on a field trip through Kilby Prison In Montgomery, Alabama and knew about conditions that impair. In 1997, I moved on to work at a juvenile development center. By this time, I thought I knew everything-I’d spent 15 years behind locked doors. Suffice it to say: I have never been more wrong.

I wrote the devotional book and am now writing this blog for several reasons: 1) in the most ungodly situations, I saw forgotten folks (stray people-Kingdom of Heaven-page 93 ) do godly things. Those things needed to be recorded. 2) I believe that in every community, town or city in this country, there are people who work tirelessly at thankless jobs. They teach or patrol or provide therapy or counseling or supervision to a strata of our society who are most euphemistically labeled difficult. They are so needy and demanding that they seem to suck the marrow from your bones and they are still unhappy. Yet these workers go back day after day. If asked why they do what they do, they often say, “I’ve got too many years in to quit.” or “I’ve got to work.” I believe most go back because they cannot stop caring. I want to try to help them see their work from a different angle.

At the juvenile detention center where I last worked, the kids were picked up and brought to us at all hours. The law required that they go before a juvenile judge the next work day. I watched one morning as a deputy sheriff came to pick up his kids. He saw a 14 year old girl and exclaimed, “Oh, Baby, No! What did you do this time?” She dropped her head and tears ran down her face. “I’m sorry” was all she could say. In that moment, that man was not a deputy sheriff, he was that young woman’s life line.

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Serving the Underserved

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Jane Hall

There is a large segment of the American population that is easy to forget.

Very few people in this country, I believe, have any knowledge of the enormity of our correctional problem. Some states, for example, lock up more folks than entire countries. And, the correctional problem is not limited to prisons. It starts in public schools with In School Suspension placements and runs the gamut to severely impaired people sleeping in the streets to armed teens in gangs. Many, many of these folks cycle repeatedly through the system until they commit significant crimes which warrant long prison sentences or perish through violence or neglect that leads to terminal illnesses. They are indeed God’s children in trouble.

Tending these people wherever they may be is very difficult work. For the most part, their placement is not a factor of chance. They have been unable or unwilling to meet society’s expectations and/or to follow God’s laws. They are often bitter and angry. They want to hold someone other than themselves responsible for their situations. It is very easy to blame the person who is there and they strike out any way they can.

The person on site is very frequently an underpaid and overworked employee stuck in a bureaucracy that is constantly breeding forms that will protect against litigation and ensure the proliferation of the agency. If this person is a Christian, the work is harder since he/she is held to a much higher standard than that of the world. Those who know the Lord are expected to follow His rules and they do not include hitting back.

For many, many of God’s “children in trouble”, the most stable and significant person in their lives is a teacher or paraprofessional, a mental health counselor, protective service worker or mental health technician, a deputy sheriff a correctional counselor or a correctional officer.

The people who do these jobs operate beneath the public radar; as forgotten as those they try to serve. Polite society would rather not ponder the plight of a teenager expelled from school, a mother who self medicates her mental illness with alcohol, a probationer with a sex offense or an inmate with a life sentence. Until the person makes a mistake or something bad just happens. Then, everyone and his brother know what should have been done.

This book is for those who keep trying to serve regardless of the odds.

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