My name is Ivan Kilgore. The piece I’ll be sharing with you today is entitled “The Glaring Contradictions in the Rhetoric of Prison Rehabilitation, Part Two.” That said, I have never partaken in or heard of a rehabilitative program that shifts the blame for crime from the individual to the various social, political, and economic structures than bore criminogenic conditions. Now, here I need the listener to visualize with me and imagine a cluster. And in the center of that cluster, we have the causes of crime, and right below that, we say how these institutional and cultural forces impacted my life and decisional making. And with this cluster, we have eight separate extensions, seven or eight separate extensions, that point out various culture and institutional forces. And I begin with miseducation.
We know poor education, the hierarchy of educational system, and the disconnect caused by culturally alienated class curriculum and racist school administrations has an impact on crime. The second point, let’s look at culture in terms of values and norms, and how things like drug dealing can be seen as a means to survive; and we have violent gang subcultures as well. When we move to the next institutional aspect we think about legislation, and that’s the criminalization of victimless crimes or discriminatory policies, or the whole tough on crime era. There’s like books and volumes full of that. The next point we make in terms of the institution is the biased court system. We all know there is a long history of racial oppression, poor legal representation, and discriminatory sentencing practices.
Next, we look at the economic structure in terms of capitalism and the inequalities created by the basically ‘dog eat dog’ world for discriminatory financial and housing institutions or job discrimination. Next, we move to the probability, the probability of crime. Here we’re talking in terms of jobs stability in law enforcement and other industry. And of course, the next point being connected with that being law enforcement, racial profiling, mass incarceration, police brutality, all these things play a role in the creation and formation of crime. And lastly, probably one of the most significant points I make in this chart is the destabilization of informal social controls. Again, the destabilization of informal social controls, which turns to the question of a lack of parental and community guidance through constructive group activity. Basically, when your pop’s locked up, who’s there to guide you and all.
That having been said, we must again question and burn the brunt of responsibility for the criminal. When will society itself be held accountable for the many failed systems that its institutions that fuel the crime machine? Often we hear about how my incarceration, my being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and my conviction for first degree murder operates to ensure public safety. Well, if this is so, then why is it that some people, some 2,000 people, have been murdered in Oakland since I was arrested in 2000. Obviously, me being held accountable alone has not prevented the next boy child, or countless other children across the nation, from being exposed to the same systematic conditions that created my so called murderous behavior. Notably, it is only on account of the fact that I have become conscious of how these conditions were designed to affect me that I can truly claim any measure of having been before. Without this knowledge and insight, without having read and studied everything that went into writing and publishing my latest book, Domestic Genocide: the Institutionalization of Society.
I was one of millions of prisoners who returned to society with little to no inclination as to why I had resorted to criminal behavior. Here, I’m not talking about what the late Professor John Aaron so aptly described as those ‘chicken shit routines of rehabilitative programming,’ which for the past 80 years have been the base of the California Department of Corrections rehabilitative model. Arguably, while it may be shared that such programs like NA/AA, Victim Awareness, are very much needed, the reality is they are not very effective in attracting the interest of those prisoners who need them the most. Here I’m talking about short term offenders, and thus they operate more effectively as a control mechanism to domesticate those inmates serving life without the possibility of parole, or other life terms, who have essentially copped out and see no other way out other than to buy into the department’s rehabilitative hype, which manipulates our hope and, in my opinion, creates an extreme form of delusion in face of a miscalculated and scant chance of being granted parole or a commutation.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
