My name is Ivan Kilgore. The piece I will be sharing with you today is entitled “The Glaring Contradictions and the Rhetoric of Prison Rehabilitation, Part Three.” Even more like progressionary caterpillars. Now when we think about progressionary caterpillars, these are creatures that if you take and set them on the ring of a flower pot and touch the head to the end of the last one, to where they make a complete circle around the flower pot and place their food in the center of the flower pot, they will not veer off that path and face starvation, exhaustion to the point of actually dying. And I say this, or I use this analogy, to basically describe the programs that we have here in Department of Corrections. Most of them are relative to the past, which have proven to fail, and again, only scratches the surface of what has driven many of us, for example, to use or sell drugs, resort to violence, think criminal, etc. For our actions are not influenced not so much by the choices we make, but more so by the structural and cultural dynamics that operate to systematically reinforce our belief system, which, generation after generation, creates our dysfunctional behavior.
Similarly, society has failed to grasp the concept: criminals are made, not born. We are made through a series of social, political, and economic processes that construct our reality. It is a reality. A culture I struggle with to this day, out of a real but misguided sense to survive. Now, somewhere I recall having read that over 90% of crime is financially motivated, yet, I’d estimate less than 1% of programs offered by the California Department of Corrections assist prisoners to develop financial literacy or the sort of skills that will assist us to meet our financial goals. Even more, with what programs that are made available, there are a number of impediments we face when trying to access or complete them. Take, for example, transfers. When you get transferred from one prison to another and you’ve already started the college program in one prison and you go to another, well, each prison has a different college program. So, now, where you may be have pursuing a degree in sociology, you get to this other program, prison, and they don’t have that. Another example is priority levels. You know, they’re based on case factors such as advancement incentives, crime, security classification, educational needs.
While such factors may seem reasonable to determine the prisoners eligibility to partake in certain programs that determine what prison he or she will be assigned to, they also determine what programs a prisoner will have access to and be excluded from. Now, of course, you also have work conflicts. In prison your job assignment takes priority over your educational needs, so, if you’re assigned a job during the time of self-help or educational programs, you’re not eligible to go to. And lastly, of course, you have lockdowns, which are self explanatory. There’s no movement, nothing going on, whatever you see these lockdowns occur, and they happen quite frequently. Of course, there are a number of other impediments that work all the same, which begs us to ponder the question: Is the California Department of Corrections maximizing the implementation of its programs to best affect prisoner rehabilitation? In light of the foregoing, I would have to say it’s not. The numbers say it all. However, before I continue, allow me to digress to emphasize a very key point in the department’s funding scheme.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
