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Working in a Female Prison Radically Changed My Perception of Human Behavior
I spent 6 months as a mental health volunteer in an Indian prison.
In 2017, I was given the opportunity to go to an Indian prison and work as a mental health volunteer for female inmates.
The main aim of the weekly visits was to provide the women with an emphatic, listening ear while taking their complaints to the legal consultant of the organization we were working with.
As our professor said at the time, sometimes authentic listening is the best thing you can do for someone.
Coming to the organization, it is a non-governmental international body with chapters in various countries. They collaborated with my undergrad psychology department to provide the prison with mental health volunteers, mainly due to the reason that there was the unavailability of any type of mental health aid to the inmates at that time.
Our efforts actually encouraged the prison staff to launch a mental health service for the prison population in the coming years.
On the first day of my volunteer program, I was nerve-wrecked. The only source of information I had about prison life was from western TV shows such as prison break and banged up abroad on the Discovery channel.
The mental image I had was composed of sharp, tall fences, scary-looking women, and pitched black corridors.
However, when I stepped into the prison compound, I was met with bright-lit, lush green yards, lush trees, and the absence of a fence. Women were roaming in the yard without any uniforms.
I even spotted an elderly woman tenderly combing another woman’s hair as sat under a tree.
We were assigned to one of the wards where women who had just come to the prison and waiting for their trial were housed. The one-floored building was made of living quarters and a common washroom area in the back. There were two smaller yards — at the front and the back with a shed covering the top.
As we entered the building, I spotted women sitting on the floors and socializing. They looked at us for a second and…
