Not Everyone Gets a Good Start in Life
I know of three head injuries my brother had.
1. Forceps birth that left the mark of the forceps on his head for 3 days.
2. Almost certainly because of the forceps birth, he was an asshole from birth and used our older sister as a teething ring and regularly bit her bloody. So our mom told her "Hit him." And one day my very mousy sister finally did. She balled up her little fist and bopped him on the head. She thinks she hit the soft spot because his eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out. He never bit her again.
3. When he was 12 and she was 14 -- before he hit his growth spurt, so she was still bigger than him -- she got tired of his sadistic, abusive crap one day and choked him until he passed out.
My brother is, of course, the boy with the difficult forceps birth who blew his severance pay on "hookers and cocaine" like people sometimes like to joke they would do if they won the lottery. The trauma of his birth not only left a visible mark on his head for the first three days of his life, it left a far deeper, uglier mark on the entirety of his life.It left a mark on his younger sister's life too. That would be me.
People with a head injury syndrome don't change because someone UNDERSTANDS and forgives them and feels sorry for them. But in my experience, neurological issues are more treatable than the literature suggests.
As documented in the piece linked above, my brother became less of an awful person over time, probably in part because of the illicit drugs for which he was vilified.
Many years ago, having nothing to do with Georgia per se, I read a piece that talked about a physician who routinely delivered Black infants with forceps because it was an aggravation to wait for them to be born. He had better things to do.My brother was delivered by forceps and he molested me when I was a child. I think those two things are related. I don't think he's a pedophile per se -- someone attracted to children -- because he's not really that much older than me, but trying to understand what happened led me to believe that pedophilia is probably a head injury syndrome.So I am deeply disturbed when I read things that suggest to me that you may be at greater risk of having a head injury syndrome inflicted at birth merely due to the color of your skin and racism in the US because some White asshole doesn't feel like he needs to bother to WAIT for a Black baby to be born like he would for a White baby.I believe we generally medicalize things too much these days and I wonder if Black Americans would be better off with doulas and midwives and only going to a hospital if the birth ends up involving an actual medical emergency of some sort.
I'm very well aware that laws in the US trend towards punishing people of color simply for being people of color. Some of that is probably unintentional and written by people with tunnel vision who don't understand how that happens but we also know some is very much intentional.
This is a health site and cleaning up the problems in our legal system with prejudice and unfortunate bias that maybe wasn't intentional is outside the scope of this project. But the health problems people of color have which contribute to landing people in jail is very much within the scope of this project.
If you run a prison, please err on the side of ASSUMING inmates of color who just can't seem to behave and any violent inmates have a head injury syndrome, possibly due to medical abuse like the behavior of the doctor described above. That makes me furious, but hopefully he's already dead of old age and maybe people are somewhat less awful these days.
Project Notes for Prison Stew on this site can help you improve nutrition for such people. And if you follow all the links, you can find this article:
As long as you are careful to make sure eating better is a voluntary option and not some kind of forced, unapproved medical experiment, you should be able to justify it based on things like goals of reducing recidivism.
Try to give them options and choices for what foods they want because people can be lactose intolerant, have food allergies etc. Sometimes food allergies aren't apparent until you eat the same thing regularly for a while, so just make sure there's meaningful choice involved and you should avoid some of the worst potential pitfalls.
Ideally, you should also have consistent and polite reinforcement of rules applied evenhandedly. I raised two difficult kids and while lectures alone don't fix anything, clear consistent communication about what is expected and civilized means to meaningfully enforce "That's not allowed." can help over time, especially if you are addressing underlying causes, like medical issues.
No, they may not ever be "normal" or whatever word you want to use, but typically someone with issues gets in trouble because things lined up such that their usual coping mechanisms failed and other people made it worse.
I'm not talking about career criminals who plan their crimes. I'm talking about people with crap lives coping as best they can and life easily goes sideways.
Such people can be helped to be more functional than they are currently. In addition to improving their medical issues, you can teach them best practices for coping.
I have a serious medical condition and I actively account for "I feel especially bad today, so don't go overreacting to people merely being annoying." If you have a big guy with a neurological issue who works physically hard, he can learn to stay hydrated and keep his intake of B vitamins up and mitigate the odds of things going sideways because it's hot and he's short on critical nutrients from sweating them out.
This is a known thing that prison riots are more likely in hot weather. It is in the best interest of the prison to habitually work on this to avoid drama.
The Black American community would likely also see lower rates of incarceration in the future if we developed a community of doulas, midwives, and obgyns trained to properly serve this community. I have three pieces currently on Witness to Destruction tagged Reproduction.
Additional posts there address salt and high blood pressure in African Americans.
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