Prison – The United States Has Never Got It Right

 

Mid-November headlines in California reported four corrections officers committed suicide in a 24-hour period. Convicted murder, former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, was stabbed and very seriously injured by another inmate in a medium security federal prison in Arizona on November 24th. Everyone in our prison system appears to face life-threatening conditions that should never be part of incarceration. But it has been the old-normal for decades.

Whether it comes from news reports, movies or television, every American knows that most of our prisons are segregated into gang or racial units – “for safety.” Shivs, fires and blunt instruments offer a brutal end to so many of those incarcerated. Technically, the deprivation of freedom, in less than comfortable surroundings, is supposed to be the only punishment, and for most who will someday be released, rehabilitation is supposed to be most of the effort. But American prisons have an unenviable task: unfriendly taxpayers, a mental health system taken apart in the Reagan era that has mostly relegated treating the mentally ill to prison custody, a society on the outside were guns and drugs are abundant and lucrative (literally making containing gangs almost impossible), understaffing with the greatest incarcerated population of any nation on earth: with a population of 4% of the world’s population, we have a quarter of the planet’s people behind bars.

For those who believe that prisons are a deterrent to crime, they really need to look at the fact that our prison populations are exploding. Recidivism is epidemic. These realities alone should dispel the deterrence argument. And for those who argue for an expedited trial and execution process for mass shooters, they need to read the suicide notes from most of those perpetrators. Our sentences are long, vary greatly in length from state to state, from federal to state, and often by race. We executed most felons in the 17th century, but eventually moved to finding a path to “rehabilitation.”

“Americans were in favour of reform in the early 1800s. They had ideas that rehabilitating prisoners to become law-abiding citizens was the next step. They needed to change the prison system's functions. Jacksonian American reformers hoped that changing the way they developed the institutions would give the inmates the tools needed to change. Auburn state prison became the first prison to implement the rehabilitative idea. The function of the prison was to isolate, teach obedience, and use labor for the means of production through the inmates. According to Rothman, ‘Reform, not deterrence, was now the aim of incarceration.’ Soon a rivalry plan stepped into place through the Pennsylvania model which functioned almost the same as the Auburn model except for eliminating human contact. This meant that inmates were incarcerated in cells alone, ate alone, and could only see approved visitors.” Wikipedia

Yet, today most of our nation’s criminal detention facilities are disgusting and cruel. Survival is anything but guaranteed. Prisoners join gangs, and thus perpetrate heinous acts in exchange for protection. Even in blue states, cruelty by inmates is often exceeded by “off-camera” guards, who themselves are overtaxed and stressed to the max. Take these facts in a current class action aimed at helping disabled prisoners in San Diego: “The complaint includes claims from people who use wheelchairs being assigned to upper bunks in small jail cells, leaving them unable to access their sleeping area… Plaintiffs’ attorneys also accuse the county of maintaining dangerously filthy jails, inadequate staffing, substandard booking processes and insufficient medication monitoring….

“The lawsuit also includes allegations from incarcerated people with disabilities such as hearing loss who say they are regularly denied sign-language interpreters, leaving them unable to communicate with healthcare providers, deputies or other jail employees. ‘I did not understand what the dentist, the jail staff or anyone else was saying,’ Cristian Esquivel, a detainee who is deaf and struggles to read and write, said in a sworn declaration to the court this year…. ‘I did not understand what was on the papers that they gave me,’ he said. ‘I did not know that they were going to take out my tooth before they did it.’” Los Angeles Times, November 13th.

That’s American “justice”… or is it justice at all? How many are in prison or jail because they fear their overworked inadequate public defender and cop a plea for a defined sentence for a crime they did not commit? Without a sliver of doubt, our incarceration practices do not work; we jail too many people for way too long in what have become institutions of higher criminal learning. Then we release angry felons into the world where records often deprive them of even a shot at a genuine living. Is there another way? Of course, but it would require a ground up revamping, something California Governor Gavin Newsom would like to try. Perhaps the Scandinavian approach based on humanity and dignity, a system where society has not saddled prisons to care for most of the serious mental patients for mere housing.

LA Times writer Anita Chabria was in Oslo Norway when she watched California corrections officer Steve Durham as he visited Halden Fengsel prison (pictures above) in September to study the rehabilitation-focused Norwegian model of incarceration. “Inside Halden Fengsel, a high-security prison in Norway, inmates choose their own clothing. Knockoff track suits from designer brands such as Karl Lagerfeld are favored.

“They buy fresh produce from their well-stocked grocery store and chop onions with knives from their shared kitchens…They play in bands and walk in the woods and pray in a graceful holy room where clerestory windows beam sunlight down onto slate floors and a compass shows the direction of Mecca.

“But what surprised California corrections officer Steve ‘Bull’ Durham most on a recent visit to Halden wasn’t the prisoners but the guards — how relaxed and happy his Norwegian counterparts were, and how casually they interacted with the inmates… ‘I am blown away by it,” he said… Durham has been a California corrections officer for 25 years, much of it in the remote reaches of Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield. He looks like the kind of guy you’d nickname Bull. Big and bald, he leans forward when he walks, like he’s battling the wind, or the world…

“Durham was one of about a dozen members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., or CCPOA, the union that represents the women and men who work in our prisons, who let me tag along with them to Norway recently… They were there to see firsthand what all the hype is when it comes to the so-called Scandinavian model of incarceration, which California hopes to import in coming months… Gov. Gavin Newsom is in the process of converting San Quentin into an institution — via the ‘Scandinavian method’ — that is focused on rehabilitation, not punishment… Tiny, rich, predominantly white and with a population roughly half that of Los Angeles County, Norway doesn’t seem like a good model for anything in California. But Newsom isn’t trying to replicate what Norway does, just adapt the basic premise to create a shift in how and why we incarcerate.

“The Scandinavian method acknowledges that people rarely go to prison for life. Instead, it focuses on the reality that most people who go into prison are going to come out again, and it’s safer for all of us if they have a plan and the skills for a future that doesn’t include more crime. That credo demands that prison is made to be more humane, and more normalized, turning the guards into at least part-time social workers… ‘It’s radical,’ Durham said, but he’s all for it.” LA Times November 12th. There’s almost nothing about the America prison system that serves the taxpayers, the inmates and even the guards. We train criminals, kill hope, instill anger and impose brutality so far beyond mere incarceration.

I’m Peter Dekom, and having studied prisons even back in my undergraduate days, all I can say is that it’s about to blow up the entire system that does not work… and never has… and build one that does… no matter how long it takes.