 |
| Source:AlterNet- columnist Chris Hedges. |
"If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions."
From the AlterNet
Prisons are for to protect the innocent from people who've hurt them and would do it again, intentionally or unintentionally. The original punishment for being in prison is the lost of freedom and going through strict security requirements, like keeping weapons out of the prison. But prisons aren't supposed to be torture chambers especially in a liberal democracy and even for people who are serving life in prison. But there to keep criminals behind bars until they've paid their debt and society, as well as showing they can be successful legally once they are out of prison. Prisons should be a productive place for the staff, the inmates where they can benefit from their time behind bars, that benefits society, as well but prisons most importantly should benefit the people who pay for them.
So a productive prison system would be a system where people enter as criminals but leave as people with the skills to succeed successfully on the outside. And now have given up their criminal careers because they simply no longer need to be criminals in order to survive and no longer want to hurt people.
For prisons to be successful, it means having rules that protects the staff as well as inmates and sanctions for inmates as well as staff for when they break the rules. But not torture, but you broke a rule and there's a price to pay for that but we aren't going to do anything to you to make you worst than you already are. That even includes solitary confinement for inmates who attack other inmates and staff. But isolation should be there to make those inmates better, not to torture them and make them harder to deal with.
So in a humane prison, inmates are following the rules, making good use of their time by educating themselves and using those skills to get a good job while in prison but doing a good job in prison. Contributing to their cost of living and even to their victims and family and once they leave prison they now have the skills to succeed on the outside.
You can also see this post on WordPress.
