Hard Rock Return To Prison Analysis

Society is the purveyor of indelible, influential people and experiences that have the ability to shape the human race in a magnanimous or deleterious fashion. Since people are the inspiration for experiences, peoples’ effects on society needs to be delineated. There are many classes of people in a society. There are not only passive and active people, but also pacifists and activists. The pacifists are the quiet peacemakers of the society that try to discourage violence. Unfortunately, their approach is too pacific it makes people soporific upon listening to their plight. The activists, on the other hand are not encouraging violence, per se, but rather encouraging the people to take action against a certain group, specifically one that …show more content…
It can be something that is literally indelible based on past experiences. In Etheridge Knight’s “Hard Rock Returns to Prison” it is exemplified that some people can go through a metamorphosis from one echelon of being an outsider to another, but nonetheless never losing the title. The main character Hard Rock “was known to not take no shit from nobody, and he had the scars to prove it”(Knight 194). Essentially, he has been in the jail scene for a while-this fact alone makes him automatically a social outsider because people who go to jail are virtually always looked down upon. After being in the slammer for a while he was taken away for treatment of his “natural” behaviors. His treatment was solitary confinement. This “treatment” desensitized him from his old ways and paralyzed him by his new “mental configuration”. This was a guy know for being belligerent and using force against officers and causing other disturbances. He even tolerated someone calling him a “black son of a bitch”(Knight 195). Another effect of them treatment and perhaps the effect behind his indifference was mental sluggishness-“it took Hard Rock exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name”(Knight 195). The inmates thought he “had just wised up” and the he “was being cool”, but that was not the case(Knight 195). Hard Rock went from being know as “Destroyer, the doer of things we dreamed of” to a debilitated, mentally and physically, by-product of cruel torture. He was now cultural outsider in two groups of society-the outside world and the “inside world” of prison. He changed. The problem is the government didn’t take care of him adequately: a change needs to happen. Hard Rock is not an inspiration but a reason to consider the protocol for dealing with “difficult” inmates. The “treatment” received is inhuman as it sears the mind and puts the person in a purgatorial solitude. His transformation