Better late than never

I sat here for several minutes trying to think of a clever way to say how I felt while viewing “Public Secrets”, but I just couldn’t muster up the energy, so I’ll just be blunt; it was depressing.  The subject matter alone was enough to bum me out, hearing about corruption and mistreatment of prisoners never leads to fun times.  It was startling just how much more potent these individuals’ stories were when not reading them, but actually hearing them, in their voice.  It’s because of this, I think, that I found myself immersing myself in many more of the interviews than I originally thought.  I listened to as many as I could in each section, before finally just having to tear myself away from the computer and listen to some happy music to turn my mood around. 

After a short break, I started listening to the interviews again with the ideas of langue and parole in mind.  Though there wasn’t a vast difference, the langue of the prisoners definitely had its own feeling, its own flavor.  Terms were used that any prisoner would instantly pick up on, but us as listeners would probably not understand the meaning, at least not right away.  Some things were easy to decipher; when talking about a correctional officer, the title was often shortened to just CO.  Others needed to be explained outright, we couldn’t quite pick up on the meaning of them from context alone.  What was interesting about this to me was that these terms that I hadn’t heard before, hadn’t been in a position to even learn, weren’t completely foreign to me.  The context that they were used in, the words (the parole?) that surrounded the term, all helped to give me at least a basic understanding of it.  It was the smaller pieces of the prisoners’ language that allowed me to understand the whole of it, or at least the whole of what we had access to.