"The justice system and the correctional system, as I have experienced them, fear truth and common sense like the Wicked Witch of the West feared water. So much of what they decree and condone and profess to believe melts away with a simple application of truth, common sense, or compassion. If the public is wise, it will have sent us here (prison) to learn useful lessons; not to be reminded in every conceivable way that we are the human refuse of these teeming shores."  THEY ALWAYS CALL US LADIES, STORIES FROM PRISON by Jean Harris

 

Jean Harris is now free. She was granted clemency by the Governor of New York.

Prisoners have remained confined without a passing thought from society on how they are treated day-to-day, year-to-year while imprisoned. One reason is that public sentiment about prisons is characterized by ambivalence and ignorance. Prisons are shrouded in secrecy and seen as necessary evils better left ignored. If prisoners are thought of at all, it is generally in a crisis situation when the media will broadcast a prison related story such as an escaped prisoner, a proposal to build a prison in your neighborhood or to announce the execution of a "condemned" man or woman.

Prisons are now punitive, "rehabilitation" as the most important goal has been officially discarded. Retribution and confinement are becoming the predominant purpose of prison. The impact of this custody and punishment orientation of prisoners ranges from a low quality health environment (seen as all the "prisoner" deserves) to repeated strip searches, denial of privileges, mental abuse and humiliation.

"If man had deliberately set themselves the task of designing an institution that would systematically maladjusted men wrote the late director of U. C. of Illinois for research in criminal justice and former Deputy Warden of the Cook County Jail, Hans Mattick, they would have invented the large walled maximum security prison." They have and they did; because any tendencies toward violent or predatory behavior that may exist among the prisoners before being incarcerated are exacerbated by these man-made conditions of prison life; violence breeds violence.

Prison overcrowding continues to generate litigation. In one judicial opinion, conditions were described as "philosophically, psychologically, physically, racially and morally intolerable."

Criminologists (the scientific study of crimes as a social phenomenon, of criminals and of penal treatment) are increasingly beginning to believe that the conditions under which most female offenders are handled are a detriment to the correctional ideal of treatment and rehabilitation. Only people with humane intentions can provide a humane penal reform system. Without immediate attention to salvaging our female prisoner resources as well as their children, our nation will become a victim of its own neglect and abuse.

Today, we live too isolated. Private property has led to an egoistic individualism in all our mutual relations. We know one another only slightly; our points of contact are too rare.

Prison does not prevent anti-social acts from taking place. It increases their numbers. It does not improve those who enter its walls. However it is reformed, it will always remain a place of restraint, an artificial environment that will make the prisoner less and less fit for life in the community. It does not achieve its end. It degrades society.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of women sent to prison are eventually released. Look within your heart for the key to your own fate.