I’ve been thinking about doing a piece on some of the many reasons the U.S. prison system is messed up, but it appears that someone beat me to it. 1 out of 100 people in this country is in prison. What the fuck? I don’t believe for one second that Americans are more prone to crime than other people. We’re the richest nation on Earth. Why are we filling up our prisons instead of helping these people?
For starters, if you think about it, the idea of prison is kind of stupid. Essentially, you take all of the worst aspects of society- hard core drug use, violence, low self-esteem, poverty, racism, and straight-up ignorance- and put all those into one central location. Many prisoners are people that are already marginalized by society. Now we send them to a place where they can have all those ideas reinforced by being around other people that think and act the same way. And we wonder why prison doesn’t seem to work.
In this country we like to talk about how we believe in rehabilitating criminals. This is utter garbage. Rehabilitation involves intensive care including education, psychological treatment, counseling, personal attention, good role models, and the opportunity to put those treatments into action. The system, as designed and run now, does none of those things. Drug use is rampant in prisons. Guards are combative, fearful, and don’t have time to act like role models. Plus they have guns. Not exactly a friendly relationship. There is no psychological treatment or counseling. Education programs are under-funded or non-existent. In short, there is no rehabilitation. To top it all off, criminals are branded for life when they leave. They don’t get to start over. What they did will follow them until they die. And out in the rest of the world, we’re so paranoid of former inmates that they rarely get a chance to fit back into society. And we wonder why prison doesn’t seem to work.
I’m not saying that prison is all bad. There is a need to keep violent people away from the general public. But we’ve got people locked away for bullshit reasons. Rapists, murderers, multiple-offenders- these are the people that belong in prison. Not people getting 5-10 for drug possession. If we had fewer people in prison, the ones that are there might get the attention and treatment they need and deserve. I know you can’t rehabilitate everyone. But at least you could make an honest effort. More importantly, the “rehabilitation” should begin outside, before prison is even a possibility. Reducing poverty and racism, increasing education and employment opportunities, and getting young kids the help they need before they turn to gangs, guns, and crime would do far more good than waiting until they are already headed down that path.
Prisons would work better if they actually treated criminals equally. The ethnic and racial make-up of prisons does not match the overall population. More minorities end up in prison, even for the same crimes committed by whites. Embezzlement, insider-trading, and other white-collar crimes are treated less harshly and receive less prison time than crimes that are perceived as “minority” driven or more blue-collar - robbery, assault, or battery. You can’t tell me without some decent proof that if 70-aught percent of America is white, we shouldn’t see at least a similar percentage in prisons. I can understand minorities making up a slightly larger proportion in prison because they are more likely to be poor, uneducated, and have fewer opportunities to do something that earns them a decent wage. But when prisons show 80% minority populations, that points to something fucked up about the system that put them there. And we wonder why prison doesn’t work.
In the end, it all comes down to priorities. We have money to fritter on a trillion dollar witch-hunt for “terrorists”, we have money to build arsenals and nukes, we have money to buy statues of dead Americans and useless libraries for every president, but magically have no money to pay for schools, community programs, youth centers, or job training. We’ve got our priorities backward. We’re spending money to protect a perceived “way of life” when we should be spending money to increase our human capital and help our own people with tangible things like a livable income. We have to bring our protection of “America” (whatever that really means) in line with the realities of its citizens. Otherwise, we will continue to be the most incarcerated group of people on the planet. And that doesn’t appear to jive with either freedom or democracy.
1 comment:
Word word word word.
And word.
The holdovers from Puritanism are rife in modern society, and are endemic of many of things which weaken our country (the hypocrisy of the death penalty, anyone?).
The punitive approach to dealing with crime does not work. Period; it is proven. Recidivist rates are unbelievably high and the justice system can't seem to blindfold itself hard enough to at least punish people equally (and this goes way beyond race-- gender, religion and ethnicity also play a proven role in sentencing).
Contrast that with actual rehabilitation programs, and you see a stark contrast-- former inmates feel better, act better, contribute more to society, and, most importantly, remain FORMER inmates.
That is a GOOD thing. Yet most of America can't seem to get over the emotional arguments surrounding the issue-- that someone convicted of robbery and assault does not deserve a television or book, let alone counseling or drug treatment programs, even if its PROVEN that such things will decrease the chances of him/her offending again.
According to this logic, it makes more sense to damage society in the long run and REALLY punish people than to spend the time and money to give them a much better chance of contributing positively to society in the future. The end result of this logic goes way beyond 1% of the population incarcerated because its a slippery slope-- a hundred different factors are helping create more criminals all the time, yet we're not turning nearly enough of the existing ones into non-criminals.
How can we feel good about a system that 1) says using drugs is a crime punishable by imprisonment, 2) admits that an alarming percent of the prison population still does drugs, and 3) refuses to spend the time or money to get those people off drugs and focused on something more positive?
At this point prison is like a hotel for crack heads.
Look for that 1% to climb nearly as fast as the price of oil, until we're faced with the undeniable truth that shit is for-real broken.
Word.
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