Border Crossings at a Therapeutic Prison: Some Thoughts after Reading Chuck Bowden’s “Torch Song”
I revisited Charles Bowden’s “Torch Song” in the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction the other day, and it reminded me of a joke I heard when I worked with adolescent-aged sex offenders that I never quite got but always thought was funny.
I spent my twenties ping-ponging between school and nonprofit work. My time coaching children in rape therapy was a particularly strange chapter of the nonprofit side of things. For two years, I worked at a facility that provided court-mandated treatment to juvenile sex offenders. The facility also had a program for treating youth who had been convicted of non-sexual violent offenses, which I worked with, as well as one for violent youth with low IQs, which I didn’t.
The anthropologist James Waldran researched similar facilities for adults and coined the expression “therapeutic prison,” which nicely captures both the place’s daily atmosphere and conceptual incoherence. As one astute youth put it to me: “This is prison with therapy.” No one seemed able to figure out when it was one, when it was the other, or how to square the circle of an institution premised on punishment that also provided therapy that aspired to moral pedagogy (“moral habilitation” in Waldran’s apt terminology).
Anyway, the joke I never got came after I’d spontaneously quit. I hadn’t planned to quit, and I had no sense of what I would do after I’d left. For a while, I floated by on money I’d saved, but I didn’t have healthcare for a long time after that. I guess I had the vague idea I’d be going back to grad school, which is what I ended up doing.
I don’t remember the details now, but the joke must have come when people were discussing the fact that I was leaving. Someone cracked to one of the supervisors that I was in fact an undercover journalist preparing to write an exposé on the facility. I was leaving because I’d gathered enough material for the project.
It was a funny joke. But why was it funny?
I guess one reason was that it was kind of true: at the time, I was gathering material for a planned experimental novel. No one knew that but me, but I guess people had sensed that I was up to something. I’d had the idea of telling a story with the constraint that the narrative would entirely be told through the documents we used in the facility (e.g., in-take reports, legal incident reports, meal report records, psychological evaluations, report cards, etc.). It was a neat idea, but I didn’t have the skill to pull it off and ended up shelving it (alternatively, maybe it wasn’t that neat of an idea).
In another sense, I always wondered about the joke: what was I going to expose? Everything at the therapeutic prison was run by the book as far as I could tell. I don’t remember any conspicuous abuse or corruption. It wouldn’t have been too juicy of an exposé.
The joke stayed with me. It felt telling. Everyone at the therapeutic prison seemed, and I think felt, guilty. We were superficially transparent but nothing if not covert. In every regard, we were heavily monitored. Of course we were accountable to the courts, and the state, and various laws. In terms of daily affairs, literally almost everything that happened at the facility was recorded by its ubiquitous security cameras. Almost every door was locked. For a long time after I quit, I would pause at doors before walking through them—a Pavlovian vestige of my time always having to unlock a door before going through it.
“Torch Song” is a unique essay; I can’t think of anything else quite like it. Through a series of impressionistic vignettes, Bowden provides an account of the psychological impact that the experience of being a sex crime reporter had on him.
“Torch Song” is meandering and not at all systematic—this is as true of the prose as of the analysis. I’m inclined to like that part of Bowden’s writing in general, but it’s particularly apropos here in capturing the odd and repetitive swirls of thought engendered by the experience of sex crime work. I’ve never read an article that has more accurately captured those psychological realities. Perhaps appropriately for the subject matter, I’ve never read one that’s tried. Indeed, Bowden presents five rules garnered from his experience:
No one can handle the children.
Get out after two years.
Always walk a woman to her car, regardless of the hour of day or night.
Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.
No one can handle the children.
I like his list, but I might amend it just slightly:
No one can handle the children.
Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.
Get out after two years.
Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.
Always walk a woman to her car, regardless of the hour of day or night.
No one can handle the children.
In case you missed it: no one wants to hear these things.
To be fair, Bowden repeatedly returns to that silence in his essay, which is ultimately one of his main points. The topic of sexual assault, particularly child sexual assault, is so taboo that even just mentioning it (as, for instance, I’m doing right now in this blog post) can cast the speaker in a dubious light. If you think about it, it’s strange to have an offense that is so sensitive that even mentioning it leads to almost immediate doubt about your own intentions (for the record, I wasn’t a sex offender as a child and am not one as an adult).
We certainly don’t handle most forms of violence that way. At least part of this is the result of the peculiar way we’ve come to conceptualize the variety of sexual assault we’re willing to acknowledge (many we don’t): it’s awkwardly framed as both a mental health issue and legal transgression. This is nicely unpacked in historian Elise Chenier’s Strangers in our Midst, though much remains to be said of that story. Needless to say, this characterization is on shaky theoretical grounds, and we’ve never quite ironed out when it’s a medical (mental health) issue, when it’s a legal (punitive) issue, when it’s a universal human issue, and when it’s a sociological issue. The first two often eclipse the second two.
Bowden points out this incoherence, and he’s right to point it out. He’s also right to insinuate that there’s something a little strange and perhaps even self-serving about it. Common sexual practices and pornographic material often contain direct reference to (at least simulated) compulsion and humiliation. Sexual assault by any definition is so wildly common that it would take a complete disconnect with reality to imagine that ordinary people aren’t complicit.
The point isn’t that we’re all rapists but rather that the line between “deviant” and “abnormal” in this area gets fuzzy really fast. I suppose this need not necessarily be related to discomfort about the violence woven into large parts of our collective sex life and desires, though I’m inclined to think that’s the bulk of it. Still, part of that willful blindness doubtless stems from a broader anxiety regarding our potential for violence and the capacity of our drives and impulses (sexual and otherwise) to manifest violently. It takes a lot to come to terms with your own potential to be monstrous (even if not only unrealized but also detested—perhaps particularly then). I suspect that’s part of why Bowden opens “Torch Song” with an anecdote about violence in general rather than sexual violence in particular.
“Torch Song” is a rich little essay and a lot can be pulled out of it, but from one perspective it can be seen as an extensive account of the type of psychological breakdown that follows from having one’s access to convenient, self-soothing falsehoods taken from you. Indeed, sex crime work is not amenable to simple stories, and the experience can quickly sensitize one to how even very sophisticated thinkers are often motivated by simple morality tales. An impatience with comforting sociological fairy tales is one of the enduring consequences of having done sex crime work.
I hear an echo of that impatience in much of Bowden’s work—regardless of whether he’s doing interviews with cartel sicarios or providing his take on nature writing. There’s an almost punk rock spirit to the way he seems constitutionally incapable of not blurting out dark and complicated truths that are impolite but cut to the heart of the issue. I suspect that language is something of a dialect that those of us with visas to the neck of the woods documented in “Torch Song” take on.
As one can imagine, this tendency towards simple solutions was particularly thick given that I was working with children. Both staff and general observers never seemed quite sure how to frame the children: victims? Rapists? Monsters? Regardless of the garment you chose, the fit was awkward. Some staff members seemed almost clinically unhinged in absurdly suggesting that minor acts of kindness (e.g., access to fresh fruit, basic manners) would mitigate the trauma that it was implied wholly explained the children’s “acting out” (a euphemism I’ve always detested).
Our treatment clearly wasn’t effective by even the most superficial of metrics, but I don’t remember anyone talking about that. We carried out the most superficial of treatment for an “illness” we couldn’t effectively define as such while preparing children for a nonexistent world of vapid sexuality defined in 2D.
I was aware of this, and it got to me. We were all aware of it, and it got to all of us. As with Bowden, what followed for me was a slow-motion breakdown. My personal trajectory was less dramatic than Bowden’s, the fireworks of his lunatic, alienated promiscuity weren’t part of my path, though we both ended in the same place: rage.
In hindsight, I was furious after leaving sex crime work. I would introduce uncomfortable topics in discussion and propose research projects on sensitive issues. I was angry.
To return to the start, what made the joke funny was that we all knew what I would have exposed. The redundancy was the basis of the humor: everything was already exposed. We were already exposed. We are already exposed.
In this regard, the final word belongs to Bowden: “You can know some things and the knowing seems to help you not at all.”