The Trouble with Prison. Plato’s allegory of the cave describes how the limited perceptions of men leave them measuring the world with only the distorted reflections of reality. The trouble with prison, as it is perceived from the outside, is that the shadows are further distended by a variety of prisms that bend reality to suit a host of preconceptions and special interests, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies. The end result of this shape-shifting is a system that produces failure as a matter of course, that pretends to protect the mass of society, and that destroys whole communities in its voracious appetite. The trouble with prison is prison.
I serve the other death penalty, life without the possibility of parole, for killing a man in a fist fight when I was 19 years old. In that I will never get out, I am free to speak a more direct and unfiltered truth than those who must convince a panel of unsympathetic officials they should be returned to the real world. My 35 years of direct experience, coupled with a powerful thirst to come to grips with my own personal truth and gain an intellectually sure grasp of this world, have taught me a series of lessons. While I do not claim to have unchained myself completely from the bonds of ignorance, I believe I can read and interpret accurately the tortured shapes on the dull concrete walls of this particular cave.
People are put in prison because nothing else works to control their behavior. This is the foundational misperception that supports the prison edifice. The truth is far less simple. There are prisoners whose lifetimes of dangerous behavior leave prison as the only choice for society, but these are a tiny minority in a sea of pathetic misfits and perennial losers walking the yards. Most prisoners are uneducated, riddled with unresolved traumas and ill-treated mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and self-esteem issues that are profound, far too often bordering on the pathological. The vast majority have never received competent health care, mental health care, drug treatment, education, or even an opportunity to look at themselves as humans. Had any of these far less draconian interventions been tried, before the descent into this wretched cave, no doubt many of my peers would be leading productive lives.
“Nothing else works” is not a statement of fact. It is the declaration of an ideology. This ideology holds that punishment for the sake of the infliction of pain is the logical response to all misbehavior. It is also a convenient cover story behind which powerful special interests hide. With recidivism rates well beyond two-thirds, the assumption for all prisoners is that of failure. It is written into the prison policies that force parolees back to failed situations, that site prisons far from the urban areas most prisoners come from, and provide no after-parole assistance.
When I first came into the California State system in the late 70s, a parolee received a decent set of clothes, a bus ticket, and $200 in cash. Today’s parolee receives a sweatsuit unsuitable for a job interview, and $200, out of which is deducted the cost of his bus ticket and decades of devaluation. The parolee, having received no real substance abuse treatment, no serious education or training, no useful mental health counseling, and holding barely enough money for a short stay in a flop house, is cast back out into the free world to swim, or more likely, sink. The aid that might make the transition successful is denied, ostensibly to save money. The pennies it would take to reestablish the parolee vanish next to the $50,000 a year it costs to reincarcerate a parole violator.
Yet again, sadly, it becomes clear on close inspection that without our mass failure, the gears of the prison industrial complex would stop. Jobs would be lost, rural communities devastated, and the flow of political contributions would dry up. From the perspective of those who depend on our failure to sustain themselves, our success would be a disaster. The prison system dresses itself in a cloak of respectability by claiming to protect society from the worst of the worst. At a certain level, this is true. There are some irredeemables, those who should not be allowed to prey on society ever again. The trouble with this assertion, and the direction it is taken, is there just aren’t enough worst of the worst to justify the concrete and razor wire empire that exists today. The definition of who fits into this excluded class has expanded dramatically over the years, along with the borders of the system. Now, along with the serial predator, is housed a serial drug addict and the serial shoplifter, and the serial loser, all serving extraordinarily long sentences on prison yards devoid of even a semblance of rehabilitation. This in the name of protecting society.
From inside this dark recess, it is nearly impossible to imagine rejoining humanity. As one state senator in California observed, if you were to set out to design a system to produce failure, this would be it. It is not surprising that this elected official represents an area that has disproportionately suffered due to these policies, and was a professor of psychology before assuming office. Whole communities have been decimated, literally, by this system. People of color, the poor, and the dispossessed are represented in numbers far exceeding their share of society. It starts on streets patrolled by an occupying force of police who view these people as less than, as suspects first and foremost. Arrests are made for the most trivial offenses, for the little acts of rebellion and frustration, not uncommon to young people everywhere. But down on the occupied bottom of society, there is no call made to mommy and daddy, no well-dressed lawyer will show up in court with a privately contracted psychologist to explain Junior’s learning disability. A bored, too often hostile public defender will convince the youth to take a plea bargain that 20 years later becomes the first strike in a life sentence for boosting a ham. Once a name has a criminal justice system number affixed to it, the move from possible suspect to probable offender is complete. In some of the worst-off communities, every third or fourth man, and a growing number of women, carry numbers on their shoulders.
The trouble with prison is indeed prison itself; the way prison is managed and envisioned. The idea that by humiliating and brutalizing damaged people, some possible good result is simply absurd, a lie perpetrated by interests who benefit from failure. It has never worked. It is not working now. It will never work. No amount of money poured down society’s communal drain will buy success. No minimum number of broken bodies and tortured spirits will purchase rehabilitation. No pyre of burnt offerings, no matter how large and hot, will somehow result in better people walking out the front gate in their gray sweat suits.
The problems are systemic and resilient. Nothing short of radical and sustained reform will be enough to overcome the resistance of a system built to fail. It may not be possible, but to not try is to condemn thousands upon thousands of our fellow human beings to a witch’s brew of victimizations, in here and out there. To not try would be an act of cowardly capitulation to bullies and thugs. To not try is to become like those who have erected the system, who keep it going, who must somehow sleep with what they do.
I’m Kenneth E. Hartman, the Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project, and editor of the anthology, Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough, a collection of stories from men and women around the country serving life without the possibility of parole, the other death penalty.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio
