My name is Ivan Kilgore, and the piece that I’ll be sharing with you today is entitled “The Glaring Contradictions in the Rhetoric of Prison Rehabilitation, Part One.” I begin this piece with a quote from Malcolm X: “When the people who are in power want to create an image to justify something that’s bad, they use the press, and they’ll use the press to create a humanitarian image for a devil, or a devil image for a humanitarian. They’ll take a person who is a victim of a crime and make it appear he’s the criminal, and they’ll take the criminal and make it appear that he’s the victim of the crime.” – Malcolm X.
I’ll begin this piece discussing the recidivism rate in California’s prison population. In some cases, it is as high as 73%. Now, what does that say about the effectiveness of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s self help and educational programs? Is it simply the prisoner himself or herself is hopeless to change, or is it something much bigger at stake in prison issues and the California politicians are keeping at bay, hiding behind smoke and mirrors? As someone who’s been incarcerated for almost two decades, I can attest to the fact that it’s definitely the latter. It’s all smoke and mirrors and the contradictions are right before you if you simply stop and peel back a few layers of the rhetoric.
But no prison can rectify the roles of the society which introduced it. That said, the most glaring contradiction of finding the whole scheme of rehabilitation revolves around its focal point. The rehabilitative model that most prisoners encounter once incarcerated forces upon us the notion that we are solely to blame for our shortcomings and that we are to accept full responsibility for them. It is an age old philosophy that has been getting kicked around since the very first prisons were built in Europe. In California, it began to pick up traction during the 1940s when the then newly appointed director of the California Department of Corrections, Mr. Richard A. McGee, professed, “…the concept that there can be no reintegration except in freedom. Rehabilitation, therefore must come from within the individual and not through coercion. With this principle in mind, the rehabilitative program contemplates not only important educational and vocational factors, but also, by and through classification and segregation, a gradual release from custodial restraint and corresponding increase in personal responsibility and freedom.”
Notably, there are several fundamental, if not glaring, contradictions in what that would prove McGee as well as the department’s reform rhetoric hollow. The first being the practice and processes of rehabilitating inmates that were to ensue from that point forward would largely omit sociological factors that have proven to significantly contribute to criminal deviancy. Second, the so called educational, vocational and what today has become known as self-help programs, that were to be established were by default, aligned with the first function of the prison, which is custody, control, and punishment. Third, in terms of responsibility and the accompanying sense of autonomy that evolves with it, it is completely stripped away from most prisons the moment we cross the threshold of prison gates.
And lastly, number four, prison, by nature, is a coercive institution, and therefore tends to operate against the very notion of developing one’s free will to make choices. Indeed, now we do bear the brunt of responsibility for changing our lives. However, the question remains, how is it that we became these people in the first place? That is the murderer, drug addict, thief, etc. Here the self-help and other educational programs offered by the department, do not even come close to answering the question. In fact, they only scratch at the surface. Even more, in my opinion, many of them have a demoralizing effect on our self esteem, in that they operate to enforce the notion that our imperfections are inhuman; that our addictions are self-afflicted, as opposed to being cultural byproducts of social engineering. Of course, all this is said and done, in spite of the fact there are numerous sociological studies that attribute criminality to the failure of American institutions to deliver on the nation’s idealism: quality education, equality, fairness, and justice for all.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
