What are they hiding? There’s been a lot of talk recently about outfitting the police with body cameras, an idea made possible by advances in technology, and by the failure of the police to advance in their treatment of people of color and the poor. Overall, seems like a good idea. What no one has talked about is bringing body cameras, or any other kind of video monitoring, into the prisons. In the few rare cases where cameras are already in place, the images have tended to outrage and horrify the public, and these have been mainly in city and county jails. This does call into question: What is being hidden from view?
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has long maintained that the bar on cameras in its prisons is for the protection of prisoners’ privacy, which has always sounded bogus to all of us on the inside of the fences. The real issue is twofold. First, the prison industrial complex needs to constantly protect against the public discovering that prisoners are actually fellow human beings. The created myth that we are somehow not fellow humans is a fundamental part of the prison system’s rationale: You can’t do what they do every day to humans. Second, the prisons need to protect themselves from the public actually seeing what goes on in these places.
The old picture telling a thousand word story is amplified significantly when that picture is moving and talking. The last thing the bosses want is for the truth of prison to be on display, and all its pointless monotony, casual cruelty, and stark deprivation, on YouTube and Facebook. And, of course, these are the real reasons the system fights so hard against prisoners having cell phones, not to mention the millions of dollars in kickbacks from the prison phone company profiteers. Abraham Lincoln observed that while you can learn a lot about a man through his adversity, if you want to see his true character, give him a little power. That’s what’s being hidden inside these places; what’s happened to those imbued with a little power, or the lives of society’s outcasts? Needless to say, it’s not a pretty sight.
Former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, when asked recently what could be done about the state of abuse cases roiling the country made the remarkable, and so very true, admission that there needed to be better screening against bullies becoming cops. That’s really what they’re hiding in these places, and that’s why there won’t be any body cameras on prison guards anytime soon. This is Kenneth E. Hartman, executive director of The Other Death Penalty Project from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
