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Newspaper Archive of
Shelton Mason County Journal
Shelton, Washington
July 20, 1978     Shelton Mason County Journal
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July 20, 1978
 
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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."