Is Anyone Ever Really A Bad Person?

While teaching a class to a group of prisoners, Hannah was writing on the white board with her back turned away from them. One spoke up, “Why is your back turned away from us, don’t you know we’re prisoners?” Hannah smiled and turned around, “What are you going to do? Kill me?” They all laughed together. This is a seemingly simple and funny scenario. But behind the scenes, this was one of the few experiences of love for some of these inmates. The feeling of being trusted is one of the purest forms of love because trust’s prerequisite is safety. Ultimately, love is fostered in safety. Many of them may have forgotten that they have a safe bone in their body. Therefore, they are deserving of love and capable of it too. 

After teaching life skills classes in a prison for a little over a year, Hannah learned very quickly that the prison system does not encourage any kind of connection. Each worker goes through a long training teaching how to be distant emotionally with the prisoners and protect themselves from the foreseen manipulation of the prisoners. No worker should ever feel love or compassion for any prisoner. Do not give them anything. No chips you have. No cards for their games. Do not go out of your way for them because they will take advantage of you. Hannah, having a big heart, hates this. It can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Treat people as if they are bad, they believe they are bad, and then do more bad things. She went behind the scenes and offered them love in minor ways after she saw so many of their kind deeds. 

In prison, inmates can become trained facilitators for classes. There was this one man who taught a basic class. He always moved with such kindness going out of his way to help out his peers. He did not let the system get him down. Every day he would remind everyone, “you can still be happy here and find purpose.” He was a light to so many. No one would have ever known he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after killing his wife. Certainly, years ago he did a bad thing, but he can wake up every day and do good things from here on out. 

Most of Hannah’s career is in DHHS or CPS, Child Protective Services. Working here she was educated on what it looks like to grow up in a home with little love. While most parents love their children very much, things like violence, poverty, drugs, alcohol, mental health, and crime distort that love. She noticed that kids in these situations see these dangerous experiences as normal because it is simply all they know. Many kids in the system also stay in the system. Like anyone else, they simply learn to mimic the behaviors they are taught at home. For example, if a child grows up in a home with domestic violence they are more likely to either build a life with an abuser or become one. This is because they believe they deserve that kind of love. Perhaps, that is the only love they know and even expect it. If they grow up to be an abuser, they adopted the beliefs from their caregiver and likely did not learn how to regulate their emotions and nervous system when angry thus creating violence in the home. 

While this column focuses on love. It is important to realize that parents or caregivers usually care about us. They are the ones who teach us how to love. But they can only teach us what they know. Sometimes there are physical, emotional, and mental barriers in the way of them showing us a healthy and fulfilling kind of love. That doesn’t mean the love is not there. But it doesn’t mean that we are not negatively affected on an individual and collective level. 

It’s easy to read this column and point fingers at people who are in prison or abusing or neglecting children, but what we do not often see is their story of how they were taught to do that exact thing. I believe that the real issue in life is not the bad things people do. The bigger issue is the collective dehumanization of people. While a bad deed or a few bad deeds hurt one or a handful of people, dehumanization goes deeper. It restructures a community’s belief system saying that a human being is not human. Thus creating separation from not only said person but the potential of anyone not being human. Which leads to the objectification of people making it easier to view a person or a group of people as an animal instead of a human. Soon we are one step away from stripping human rights away from a person or group. Dehumanization of a person or group stops them from ever healing and contributing to society in a healthy way because they form the belief they are not capable of doing so. Yes, people need to be held accountable for doing bad things. But we as a society also need to be held accountable for how we choose to see people who do bad things publicly. Everyone has a story. We are all a bad person in one person’s story and a hero in another’s. At the end of the day, peace can only come from a place of connection not disconnection or separation. 

After reading this, I encourage you to think about the good and bad things you have done. Dive into your history of how you were taught to love. How has that shaped you in positive and negative ways? In what ways can you add to the contribution of love in society? It is important that you examine the bad things you have done in relation to the way you were taught to love. Then and only then can you effectively reshape the way you love and therefore show up in the world around you. 

THAT'S LOVE.

Shana Schoone writes “The Heart of Omaha,” a weekly column celebrating all the ways love is shown in the O.