Prisons

Prisons

    To be clear, I've never been in prison (luckily) nor do I have any plans to do so, thus I don't have any eyewitness tales or personal insights to reveal.  But I've found it a bit disturbing to read so much recently about life in prisons and the state of our prisons, not only for those people so caught and convicted, but also for those mentally ill and thrown into prison (in the U.S., this is usually a separate prison from the many independent and privatized prisons that house most of the court-convicted).  Backing up a bit, a few of my friends have served decades in both law enforcement and in prison management, and they'll be the first to tell you that there are people out there (and some who are now in prison) who are indeed just bad people.  Now my friends do have some eyewitness tales of prison life, vicious beatings with one prisoner (a known multiple killer serving a life sentence) pummeling but not killing a fellow prisoner because (as he told my friend) he "didn't feel like it today." 

    So there's that side, those prisoners there for a reason, having committed a crime against others whether that was robbery or physical harm or just plain bad luck, wrong place, wrong time.  But there are also those who just made a mistake and are suddenly thrown in with hardened criminals.  One argument says that if you're not a criminal when you enter prison, you will be when you leave.  Con games, defending yourself, doing things you'd never do otherwise just to survive.  You hear the stories, the gang rapes, the beatings, the guards turning away as you scream for help.  This was the case in a story in The New Yorker about a Florida prison for the mentally ill titled Madness.  Here's how author Eyal Press described one witnessed scene: One Saturday in June, 2012, Krzykowski (Harriet Krzykowski, a psychiatric technician hired at the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida) was finishing a shift when she heard that an inmate in the T.C.U. named Darren Rainey had defecated in his cell and was refusing to clean it up.  He was fifty years old, and, as Krzykowski recalls it, he gave people unnerving looks, “like he was trying to see inside you.”  He had been convicted of possession of cocaine, and suffered from severe schizophrenia.  “What’s going on with Rainey?” Krzykowski asked a guard.  “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll put him in the shower,” he told her.  Krzykowski remembers hearing this and feeling reassured.  “I was thinking, O.K., lots of times people feel good after a shower, so maybe he will calm down.  A nice, gentle shower with warm water.”...The next day, Krzykowski learned from some nurses that a couple of guards had indeed escorted Rainey to the shower at about eight the previous night.  But he hadn’t made it back to his cell.  He had collapsed while the water was running.  At 10:07 P.M., he was pronounced dead.

Krzykowski assumed that he must have had a heart attack or somehow committed suicide.  But the nurses said that Rainey had been locked in a stall whose water supply was delivered through a hose controlled by the guards.  The water was a hundred and eighty degrees, hot enough to brew a cup of tea—or, as it soon occurred to Krzykowski, to cook a bowl of ramen noodles. (Someone had apparently tampered with the T.C.U.’s water heater.)  It was later revealed that Rainey had burns on more than ninety per cent of his body, and that his skin fell off at the touch...In the days after Rainey’s death, Krzykowski learned from several inmates in the T.C.U. that Rainey was not the first person who had been locked in that shower; he was only the first to die there...two of the guards who took Rainey to the shower, including a former football player named Roland Clarke, were promoted.  (Both later resigned; their files included no indication of wrongdoing.)

    So there's that.  But what of this other take, this time a lengthy review of a series of new books out about prisons and prison life.  In a review in the New York Review of Books, author Adam Hochschild writes: Some time ago, I was at a book festival in Finland...I said I’d like to visit some prisons.  Finland locks people up at well under 10 percent the rate we do in the United States, a gap far more dramatic than all the differences between the two countries’ populations could explain.  I was curious to see what prisons in this society looked like.  Kerava Prison, the first of the two that I saw, was in the countryside half an hour’s drive north of Helsinki.  Its governor—by design, the title has a civilian sound—was a warm, vivacious, gray-haired woman named Kirsti Nieminen, a former prosecutor.  On this wintry morning, she had about 150 prisoners in her charge, all men.  Her office wall was lined with portraits of former governors, the first a heavily bearded one from the 1890s.  Next to these was a framed drawing from a prisoner—Snoopy typing a letter, which she translated for me: “Dear Governor, please give me a leave!”...The rough equivalent of an American medium-security prison, Kerava had barbed-wire fences, bars on some windows, and plenty of locked doors.  Some convicts worked in greenhouses outside the walls, but only if they were trusties or under guard.  Most resemblance to American prisons ended there.  In the greenhouses the inmates raised flowers, which were sold to the public, as were the organic vegetables they grew.  As we walked, Nieminen pointed out a stream where prisoners could fish, a soccer field, a basketball court, a grain mill, and something she was particularly proud of, a barn full of rabbits and lambs.  “The responsibility to take care of a creature—it’s very therapeutic,” she said.  “They are always kind to you.  It’s easier to talk to them.”...For an hour or so, I had coffee with half a dozen prisoners.  Marko, thirty-six, wore a visor and had tattoos and said he was here for a “violent crime” that he did not specify.  Jarkko, a burly twenty-six-year-old, was doing three years and ten months for a drug offense; Reima, thirty-six, blond and tough-looking, was in for robbery.   Kalla, at forty-eight the eldest, had committed fraud; Fernando (his father was from Spain) was twenty-six, convicted of armed robbery and selling heroin; Harre, twenty-seven, was doing five years for selling Ecstasy.  Also sitting with us, and helping with translation, were Nieminen, a young woman from the national prisons service, and two of Kerava’s teachers, also both women.  No armed guards were in sight, and both officials and convicts wore their own clothes, not uniforms.  This was still a prison, however, and at 7:30 each evening the inmates were locked in their two-man cells.  These were not large but somewhat more spacious than those I’ve seen in American prisons, each with a toilet and sink in a cubicle whose door closed.  Prisoners were allowed TVs, stereos, and radios.  Down the corridor were a shower room and sauna—something no Finn could imagine being without.  Prisoners were assigned jobs, but most spent much of their day in classes on subjects including auto repair, computers, welding, cooking, and first aid.  A library held several thousand books—more than you would find in many American high schools—and inmates could use the national interlibrary loan system to get more.  I attended a cooking class and shared a tasty lunch its students had prepared: Karelian stew, which included beef, pork, potatoes, and cranberries....All this was obviously another world from the overcrowded and underfunded prisons of the United States, where classes, if they happen at all, are often a slipshod afterthought.

    But the facts and data are coming in, and here in the U.S. at least, the justice scales seem a bit skewed which possibly accounts for our high incarceration rate.  Possession of Crack cocaine (primarily used by blacks) carries much stiffer penalties than does possession of powdered cocaine (primarily used by whites).  The populations in prisons is five times more blacks and two time more latinos than whites.  And generally, white collar crime (such a banking fraud or tainting prescriptions or other such actions that might have affected hundreds if not thousands of people) generally are punished with a lesser sentence in a "lite" prison, much as that in Finland.  Why is that?  A Congressman guilty of fraud or embezzling taxpayer's monies gets to have it "easy" in what's now termed a country-club prison with minimal security?  Or a dictator is separated and sent into exile (not always with his government's blessing) for fear that he will be killed in prison, despite his possibly giving orders to have many others killed during his reign? 

    But adds author Hochschild about our prisons in the U.S.: We have so many prisoners that the American unemployment rate for men would be 2 percent higher (and 8 percent higher for black men) if they were all suddenly let out.  Our jails are so packed that through the website www.jailbedspace.com wardens and sheriffs can look for space in other facilities if their own is full.  Arizona and California have even considered plans to house inmates in Mexico, where costs are lower...The prison boom has also been a chance to make money.  One private prison company alone, the Corrections Corporation of America, today runs the country’s fifth-largest prison system, after those of the federal government and the three biggest states.  The less money such corporations spend on staff training, food, education, medical care, and rehabilitation, the more profits they make.  States, at least in theory, have a financial incentive to reduce recidivism, but for private prisons, recidivism produces what every business wants: returning customers.  No wonder these companies push hard for three-strikes laws and similar measures.  In 2011, the two biggest private prison firms donated nearly $3 million to political candidates and hired 242 lobbyists around the country.  Another industry with a vested interest in keeping prisons full, writes Jeff Smith, is that of food wholesalers, who know that this market of 2.2 million people is powerless to protest if much of the food delivered to them is well past its sell-by date.  In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Federal Death Penalty Act, thus adding another 60 offenses considered to be capital crimes which carries the possibility of the death penalty...the law is still on the books.

    Throughout the world, there is a divide in how justice is played out.  Each county, each court, each judge likely wants to uphold what he or she feels is right even if some might hold different beliefs of what is right or wrong or what does or doesn't work as constructed under the laws on the books. Tough love or rehabilitation, we can carry those same judicial beliefs into parenting and into our schools.  It's a difficult question to both answer and to apply universally. But one thing is certain, with a current population of  22% of all prisoners now in U.S. prisons,* this might be the time to search for the right solution....for there IS a problem, but maybe it is outside our prison walls and not within them.


*An interesting peek at the incarceration rate of other countries is available at Wikipedia.  Cuba and Thailand maybe...but Belize and England?  You just might be surprised...