Kenneth E. Hartman, California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster. “Prisoners Remain Less Than Human.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ended its term with a couple of wins for progressive voices, upholding the Affordable Care Act and finally granting marriage equality to all Americans. But the conservative majority managed to regroup on the issue of the death penalty, allowing the states to go ahead and conduct lethal injection executions with a patched-together three-drug cocktail that doesn’t always work. Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, likened the result to being burned at the stake–dying in a state of being burned alive, but from the inside.
After the high-minded rhetoric of the healthcare and marriage equality decisions, the thuggish tone of the majority in the death penalty case sounded especially ugly, and it laid bare a fundamental truth of criminal justice jurisprudence in this country: prisoners remain less than human. This has to be so, because how else can a decision that allows for deliberate torture be explained? As bad as that death penalty decision is, it’s certainly not the only evidence that we, prisoners, are not accorded our humanity. Far from it.
The U.S. Supreme Court has long ruled that prisoners don’t deserve to be treated as full humans. It’s legal to deny us to vote. It’s legal to compel us to wear humiliating uniforms. It’s legal to force us to live in conditions that ought to shock the conscience of a normal person. It’s legal to deny us a whole panoply of rights and privileges solely because we’re in prison, even when the exercise of those rights and privileges would not impact the prison in any meaningful way.
It’s worth noting that our peer nations do not treat their prisoners in a similar fashion. Most all democracies allow prisoners to vote. France recently passed a law forbidding any prisoner from wearing clothing that identified them as prisoners; orange is most definitely not the new black there. More fundamentally, our peer nations don’t strap prisoners down onto a gurney and inject poison into their veins so they can burn to death from the inside.
They also don’t sentence prisoners to life without the possibility of parole–the other death penalty–so they can gradually disappear into a fog of misery, because doing either of those barbaric acts to another human being would be wrong. Period. Until everyone in this country is accorded their full human rights, including prisoners, the fight must continue. It’s not yet time to declare victory. This is Kenneth E. Hartman, Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project, from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
