I work in a minimum-security women’s facility that feels more like a college dormitory than a jail. The women take classes in life skills, parenting, substance abuse recovery, knitting, and Nonviolent Communication. There is a garden where they grow vegetables and prepare meals in their kitchen. They also foster kittens that are too young to be adopted. Caring for the kittens gives the women something to nurture and love, and it’s touching to see how fiercely some of them protect those animals.
One day when I arrived at work, several inmates were furious because someone had cut off the whiskers of one of the kittens. Women were going from room to room demanding to know who had done it and insisting the person would “pay” for it. Eventually, one inmate was accused. She “rolled over,” meaning she transferred to a higher-security facility. I never saw her again.
I tell this story because I spent a long time wondering why someone would cut off a kitten’s whiskers. The woman who allegedly did it was a student in one of my classes. When she shared stories from her life and others guessed emotions like anger, rage, or hurt, she often responded, “No, I didn’t mind when my boyfriend treated me like that.”
Many of these women grew up in homes where emotions were not safe, valued, or encouraged. This is not unique to people in prison, though it may be more pronounced there. Many of the women come from deeply abusive backgrounds. Some were molested by fathers or grandfathers—the very people they should have been able to trust for love and protection.
I once heard an ex-offender say he grew up believing the world was dangerous, so he became dangerous to protect himself. I think the same is true for many of these women.
I believe healing begins when people can identify and trust their emotions. So I start with a gentle, practical approach. I teach that feelings help keep us alive: if we couldn’t feel hunger or cold, we wouldn’t eat or put on a jacket. From there, we explore both physical and emotional feelings and connect those feelings to underlying needs. In my experience, the women in jail are deeply hungry for empathy.
As I reflected on the woman who cut off the kitten’s whiskers, I realized that whiskers help cats orient themselves and navigate the world. Without them, the kitten loses an important way of sensing its environment. In a painful sense, the kitten was experiencing something similar to what the inmate experienced emotionally: disconnection from feeling.
Human beings need others to share and recognize their experiences. When someone has lived through chronic abuse, they may unconsciously recreate pain in others as a way of saying, “See what I feel. Don’t leave me alone with it.” Cutting off the kitten’s whiskers may have been a tragic and misguided attempt to receive empathy.
I believe many crimes are distorted expressions of unmet emotional needs. One of my current students is incarcerated for physical violence. She was beaten throughout childhood by a stepfather who also abused her mother. When we talk about her past, it’s clear how much pain she still carries. Sometimes violence becomes a way of saying, “If you feel what I felt, then at least I’m no longer alone.”
Perhaps some acts of violence are tragic attempts to create connection through shared pain. Of course, the cycle backfires. The person who harms others is punished and isolated, which often deepens the pain and increases the need for empathy. And so the cycle continues.
I dream of a world where people in emotional pain receive the empathy and understanding they need before that pain turns into harm.