July 20, 1978 Shelton Mason County Journal | ![]() |
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'Sex-crazed' prison sociologist Bob Barl00q.00r:
'Life's I
By STEVE PATCH
It's not easy, even for Bob
Barber. TM
Loving life's-losers is rarely a
labor of love. You run the risk
of having all your giving and
trusting and hurting - all your
love - thrown right back: in your
face.
You even run the risk of
being called a pervert by those
incapable of seeing beyond the
end of their own penises.
Bob Barber- retired prison
sociologist, tight-security
advocate and professed lover of
all of God's wayward children,
incarcerated or otherwise - has
seen the many sides of such love.
He has been the target of
scorn. He has been called a dirty
old man. He even has been the
proud surrogate father.
And that is why he is now so
distraught over a prison reform
system he believes is dispensing
systematically with one after
another of its so-called "reform"
aspects - a system which more
and more is bending only to the
fear-induced demands of the
not,so-silent majority.
"And all the average person
wants," observes Barber, "is to
make sure the offender is
punished. He somehow equates
punishment with treatment. 'Has
he been punished enough?' he
asks. 'Has he been castrated
enough to make him stop
whatever he's been doing?'
"But what the average person
fails to understand is that it just
doesn't work that way. The
habitual offender is striving for
his lost birthright. The human
compulsion to 'be' is so strong,
if you can't get it legitimately
you have to get it illegitimately."
Although he's no Pollyanna,
Barber believes reform is usually
possible. But it is possible only
with an understanding of the
roots of the offender's problems
- roots that cannot possibly be
unearthed, much less
meaningfully communicated back
to the offender - without the
assistance of personnel trained in
the psycho-social processes
volved. " .....
Those personnel are a dying
ers
breed in tile Washington
Corrections Center here, where
Barber was senior sociologist for
11 years before retiring in 1976.
Where there were once six to
eight staff sociologists to "work
the resident up as a functioning,
vital human being, not just an
abstraction," as Barber puts it,
today there are only two.
"And they're only allowed to
classify," adds Barber. "The
residents are just being labeled as
the orders come down."
Barber himself is among the
pioneers of a diagnostic
treatment method whose largely
Freudian roots have earned it a
reputation among many prison
(=re
Barber traces the black and
Mexican communities' relatively
great predisposition for
criminality to a similar social
dysfunction.
"Both have tended to be
extreme matriarchal societies,"
he says. "They've tended to put
mothers up on pedestals,
respecting them whether they've
earned it or not. And the man's
sexuality has never been regarded
as a natural consequence of his
manhood. Mothers would tell
their children, 'Now, don't you
grow up to be like your father!'
"Look back in history. Until
only recently, if a black man
tried to show he had balls, he
"Incorrigible? No. You can't give what you
haven't got. You can't go where
you're not going..."
workers and bureaucrats for
being unusually sex-oriented.
"It got to where people were
saying, 'That goddamn Barber!
Doesn't he ever get off sex?!'"
laughs the sociologist. "Why, I
was actually accused of using
these guys homosexually!"
Barber reasons, as did Freud,
that sexuality, mankind's most
direct means of participating in
its own immortality, as it were,
is at the core of even the least
conscious of social activities,
acceptable or otherwise.
And this basis, he maintains,
is readily apparent in the
personalities and methods of
most "social misfits" and
criminal offenders. He can give
endless examples.
"Son of Sam, Richard Speck
- many of your well-known
killers, in fact - were raised by
dominating, castrating women,"
he says. "When they entered the
'sass-back' age, the time when
they were beginning to grow hair
on their testicles and show an
interest in girls - were 'getting
their balls,' as we would say -
they had no strong father figure
to get tl!eir manhood from. In
otheY w6ds, theymissed out on
their birthright."
got them cut off."
The resultant psycho-sexual
gap, says Barber, is apparent in
the very appearance of many
black men. The "stud pimp"
look is a classic: "The big, long
Cadillac - a phallic symbol if
there ever was one," says Barber.
"The tall hat, prominent as the
glans of a penis. Flashy pendant
jewelry. Big, tall boots.
"And, of course, the gun is
the ultimate phallic symbol, isn't
it?"
Barber is not surprised in the
least by the eventual
waywardness of such individuals,
fixated psycho-sexually at an age
when they should have been
reinforcing their developing
manhood rather than having it
psychologically denied.
"It's like the American
Indians who lost their
birthright," he says. "They go
hysterical, because this heritage
elemental to their existence,
much as it is to all of us. In fact,
if 1 were black, I'd probably try
to overthrow the government,
because it's the government that
is trying to rob them of their
heritage."
......... In his years as a prison
sociologist, Barber has seen
MANNING THE TOWERS at the corrections center here is his foremost
concern, and is the theme of his "Whistleblowers" parade and
demonstration in Olympia a week from Saturday, but 64-year-old Bob
Barber is very much concerned with the welfare of the inmate, as well.
"The people who make decisions want to know where the inmate's head is
at," he says. "But what they find out they always label confidential' and
hide from him. I tried to get this out of the confidential file and on to
the person himself, so he could reach for that lost birthright..."
Page 10 - Shelton-Mason County Journal - Thursday, July 20, 1978
literally thousands of personal
cases supportive of this theory of
arrested psycho-sexual
development. In fact, he claims
that not once has he seen a case
that defied such explanation.
"This identity crisis, this 'To
be or not to be' - what I call
the lost birthright - is the core
problem," says Barber. "You can
see it in many women offenders,
too. Lacking the birthright from
their mothers, with whom for
one reason or another they could
not identify, they became
tomboys.
"And then, like their male
counterparts, when they
discovered that being fixated at
that stage was not rewarding in
our society, they tried to find
their lost heritage by 'hitting the
bricks,' or getting out on the
street with their peers and doing
daring things until they got in
trouble and got picked up by the
police."
The biggest problem with the
typically punishment-oriented
"treatment" that followed,
inevitably, wasthat it changed
nothing. The person went into
the can because he was
unconsciously striving for a
heritage he didn't understand
and he came out with neither
the heritage nor the awareness
that it was missing.
"So more often than not he
went right back to doing what
he did that got him in trouble,"
says Barber. "After all, we all
tend to resort to those things
that symbolize success, even if
they also represent our mistakes
of the past."
Barber likens this arrested
psycho-social or -sexual
development to a car that's gone
off the road before reaching its
destination. "For some people
'the car went off the road' at a
time when they should have
been learning from their fathers
the correct and responsible way
to relate to women," he says, by
"way of example. "The result is
they become oversensitized to
women and tend to either avoid
'them altogether or use them one
after another as sex objects."
Homosexual offenders, says
Barber, often display a tendency
particularly reflective of this
"car.off.the-road" developmental
arrestment theory. If you want
to see it in action, he says, just
spend an evening along Seattle's
First or Second Avenues, up near
Pike Street Market. It's the
stomping ground of the area's
"chickens" and "hawks"
"The hawks are the
homosexuals and the chickens
their young sexual targets,"
explains,Barber. "And,
interestingly enough, the chicken
in each case usually is the same
age as the hawk was himself
when 'the car went off the
road.' "
One real-life example, says
Barber, was a man who came to
the institution here after being in
a federal pen for a time for
burglary. He was about 50.
Although he was homosexual,
none of his offenses had involved
his sexual liaisons with young
boys.
"As a kid he'd been locked
up in institutions from the age
of four or five," says Barber.
"Because of this he'd never made
an adequate psycho-sexual
adjustment. His 'car had gone off
the road' at preadolescence - at
a time when boys normally can
relate only with boys, anyway -
so he had become fixated
homosexually.
"And he was attracted only
to very small boys - to boys the
same age as he had been when
he 'went off the road.'"
Contrary to the opinion of
many armchair observers of the
now popular gay.rights
embroglio, Barber does not see
homosexuality as a birthright of
its own. "Often people say,
'Some of the apples simply
weren't meant to have seeds.'"
he says. "But I can see a definite
cause-and-effect relationship.
"Homosexuals so often were
fixated at the genital stage, you
see. They are hung up on it.
They didn't get them themselves,
so now they're trying to get their
cock and balls from someone
else."
Obvious sexual implications
- especially those of a repressed
nature - are common among
certain types of criminal activity,
says Barber. Many safecrackers,
for instance, after drilling and
planting a charge, actually have
d "s ch i I dren ,
Retired 'Rabblerouser' Bob Barber
"The habitual offender is striving for his lost birthright. The human compulsion
'be' is so strong, if you can't get it legitimately you have to get it illegitimately.
been known to experience time frame of two weeks, I had
orgasms at the point of guys on my caseload at the point
explosion. Breaking andentering, of rioting, they were so
too, have tended to be frustrated. And the stenography
masturbatory in their crew was just sitting around
psychological and physical crocheting! None of them
effects, wanted to work."
"There was this one guy," Refusing to go along with
says Barber, "who'd cruise for this "bandaid counseling," as he
nookie and, when he didn't get puts it, Barber persisted in going
it, he'd take his car and smash about his work professionally
into an ice cream store and fix and at the customary pace - not
himself a banana split with balls one decreed by some lofty
of ice cream." bureaucrat with no knowledge of
"She said, 'Dad, you're an intellectual
snobl' And, you know, I had to
agree with her..."
In the same way that
arrested psycho-sexual
development seems to be a
common denominator in many
habitual offenders, their marital
relationships often appear to
bear roundabout testimony,
observes Barber. One of his
favorite examples is what is
known as premating ritual
fighting.
"It starts when the couple
has a little tiff and then makes
up before going to bed," he
explains. "Pretty soon it
becomes a pattern, and the
fighting actually becomes a
necessary part of the foreplay, as
it were.
"Well, this actually can hold
together a marriage that
otherwise would have ended long
before," he goes on. "That is, it
holds it together until finally one
day the fight erupts when the
man is in the saddle with his
woman. All at once she starts
egging him, because she doesn't
like being treated like a sex
object. So now they can't
perform - and he has to go out
with the guys to prove to
himself he's not impotent."
Back on the streets, his
"manhood" at stake, he soon
gets in trouble again and winds
up in jail.
So incarcerated, the offender
stood a reasonably good chance,
perhaps as recently as three years
ago, of benefiting from a
counseling program the likes of
the one pioneered at the
corrections center here. At least
he might have been made aware
of the roots of his problem.
But that, says Barber, was
most decidedly before the
central office in Olympia
essentially dismantled the
counseling staff here, about two
years ago.
"The time frame for
preparing indepth evaluations on
each new resident here was six
weeks at first," says the retired
senior sociologist. "When they
cut it down to four weeks, I
remember the very words of the
people in the central office.
They said, 'Run them through
like rocks through a screen at a
construction site.'
"Well, when it got down to a
what works and what doesn't
work in the system itself.
It met with little support, of
course. If his sometimes
shockingly sex-oriented theories
had alienated him at times,
Barber's hardnosed refusal to'
compromise himself
professionally nearly got him
canned•
"They tried to fire me for
about six months there, for
failure to carry out job
objectives," he says. "So I went
to the union and got its backing,
on the grounds that my
professional job performance was
being compromised."
The comment of a colleague
during the subsequent personnel
board hearing on the matter
pretty well sums up the climate
of opinion, says Barber. The man
told the embattled sociologist, in
effect, that counseling and all
were things of the past, "because
we're bringing back the death
penalty, anyway."
Although it didn't say it in
as many words, the personnel
board ruled similarly. Bob Barber
was to conform. Period.
"So I quit," he says. "I
didn't want to be a part of it.
Professional ethics and standards
had gone down the board, and
we'd been castrated
professionally and turned into
eunuchs."
For an appreciation of the
critical nature of the reduced
time frame for processing
new-resident placement orders -
that is, whether they be placed
under maximum, intermediate or
minimum security - Barber
relates a potentially dangerous
incident that actually occurred
here a couple years ago, and
could well be occurring routinely
at this point.
"This guy came to us from
out of state," he says. "He had a
record of violent crimes as long
as your arm and your leg, but no
one here knew it because the
FBI report on him hadn't arrived
yet."
By the time it finally did
arrive, around the sixth week,
the inmate was just about to be
shipped off to minimum
security, so succesfful was his
bluff.
The FBI report changed that
in a hurry, of course - but had
the amended two- or even
four-week time frame been
applied tinbendingly a potentially
dangerous inmate would have
been in the weakest of custody
situations.
"And there's certainly no
reason to expect the institution
is now receiving its various
statements and reports any
earlier just because the time
frame for processing has been
shortened," adds Barber.
Another chief source of
displeasure was the progressive
deterioration of the institution's
security system. The supposedly
foolproof electronic fence
surrounding the grounds had this
troublesome tendency to go on
the blink when it was foggy or
drizzly, for instance.
"The prison officials tried to
bluff the inmates into drinking
all was well with it," says
Barber, "but eventually word got
out that it didn't always work
the way it was supposed tO."
And then, along about 1974,
when the staff attrition to which
Barber refers began in earnest,
two of the four manned towers
were unmanned - again, to save
money.
"But, as is the case with
institutional planning in general
now," says Barber, "it was a
penny-wise, pound-foolish thing.
It's true, of course, that no
system is truly escape proof. But
I would think they ought to
!
"ONE COWORKER told me
social responsibility Was a
thing of the past, since
'we're bringing back the
death penalty, anyway.' "
make them as escape
possible."
Sadly, adds Barbl
Washington Corrections
here is not, in his
particularly difficult
which to escape. Not
"And the inmates
are practically socialized
in terms of trying,"
"Why, they're watcldng
escapes on TV all the
when they get together
bull sessions they're
goading each other on
prove 'how much
have.' "
Even if they don't
escape, says Barber, the
invariably gain little
residence that might
their returning again one
has become kind of
school, in a sense," he
"They aren't
anything that would
their self-image in any
This seemingly u
pattern of ins
reentrainment of s0C
unfortunates has pained
for a long time, but
never more so than
years. It seems a
degrees in psycholo
English (from Lewis
College) and minors in
sociology and
things in one light
married father of four
in quite another. •
"For years I think I;
to dealing with these
from across a desk,"
the convicted associates.
in a way I used that
"Then one day my
invited this young man
live with us. He was
and out - a drug user
Well, in my time, be
drug scene, people
drugs were below
They were loathsome. A
the way I reacted. I
him in our home.
"That did it. My
got mad and yelled,
an intellectual snob!'
know, I had to agree
didn't really care
about people "
Although brought
church-going family
a "Sunday Christian," aS
Barber had to admit theO
really didn't understand i
was all about, this
loving your fellow man.
"There's really two
being practiced," h
There s Christianity,
these 'Jesus hoppers'
and then there's
churchgoers unfort0
practice, and t
'churchianity.'
"Now I really adrniO
Jesus hoppers. I think
• got the right idea, yo0
And only when we start
to love the criminal
fellow child of God
begin to solve some
problems."