What I Have Discovered First-Hand About Prisons

By  Troy T. Thomas

 In the contemporary United States, few topics are more volatile than crime and the problem of how society should respond to it.  The fear of street crime leaves countless people trapped in their home.  Illegal drugs and the violence they engender are widely considered our society's most serious problems.  For politicians, nothing spells ruin so quickly as being perceived as "soft on crime."

In this atmosphere, a chorus of voices is demanding that the criminal “injustice” system “get tough” with offenders.  More prisons, longer prison terms, few restraints on the actions of police and the courts - these are the measures that are proposed to make your streets safe and curb the violence in our daily lives.

It is unfashionable in the extreme to question whether such policies will actually work.  Those who do are often dismissed as fools or "bleeding hearts" that care more for criminals than for their victims.  Yet the questions demand to be asked.  Taxpayers are called upon to spend billions of dollars every year to build bigger prisons and lock up more and more citizens (more than 2.5 million).  Is this money well spent?  (Oh, and by the way, when I look around this prison all I see is poor Blacks and Latinos with a handful of Whites and from what I've read from multiple sources this is the trend all over America.)  In addition "white collar crime" costs America hundreds of billions of dollars more than street level crime.  Only until recently rich folks didn't even go to jail.  In addition, poor people don't import the tons of drugs or distribute military grade weapons.  I don't know of any Black owners of Smith & Wesson gun-making companies! Whose pockets is this money going into?  Will it bring justice to offenders or security to the law-abiding?

I firmly believe any effort to closely examine the prison system must encompass the social, economic, and political context within the system it operates.  It also reflects the understanding that the stated purpose of prisons is to warehouse criminals but it is not the only function prisons serve.

Throughout their two hundred plus year history prisons have fulfilled a variety of unstated and often unconscionable functions.  Such institutions always have done, at once, much more and much less than they are said to do. It seems to me that the real roots of crime in America are associated with a constellation of suffering so hideous that, as a society, it cannot bear to look it in the face.  So it hands its casualties over to a system of so-called “correction” that will keep us from its sight.

As a poor person of color (and I’m not making excuses because now that I know the truth about what’s going on I can move on to better things in my life) it doesn’t take a PhD in sociology or economics to see that the social policies for the past two decades or so have caused an unprecedented increase in the numbers of people living in poverty in the United States, as well as an ever-widening gap between the incomes and living standards of the rich and poor.  Throughout this entire period, prison populations grew rapidly according to the FBI crime statistics.  With budgets slashed for every type of social service and educational programs, prisons now stand out as the country’s principal government program for the poor!  In fact, it is a bitter irony that the high cost of prisons (America spends upwards of 200 billion dollars to run its state, federal and county prisons and jails a year) cuts into the health, education, and social services needed by the very people who, lacking such supports, often end up in prisons.

Meanwhile, African/Latino-Americans and other people of color are stigmatized as "criminals" and drug addicts through media images that subtly (and NOT so subtly) mask the equal participation of whites in the culture of addiction, crime, and violence.

The deepening polarization of society thus becomes a self-perpetuating cycle in which the image of the criminal “under-class” is used (Willie Horton is a prime example) to garner support for the very policies that greatly contribute to the destruction of poor urban communities.  As a result, our society is polarized further and further not only into the haves and the have-nots, but also into the incarcerators and the incarcerated.  So it seems the greatest of evils and the worst of “crimes” is poverty!

If one had systematically and diabolically tried to create mental illness, one could probably have constructed no better system than the American “correctional” system.  Oh, and by the way, if you want to know about prisoner human rights abuses, you don’t have to go overseas to visit Abu-Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay.

And for all you folks who like to study history:  If you go back in history and plot the population of all prisons and compare it to all the other variables you can think of, you will find a positive correlation only with unemployment.  The higher the rate of joblessness,  the higher the rate of prison commitments.  There is no question about it.  In addition, unemployment creates economic and psychological stress that frequently is manifested in criminal behavior.  Also, statistically speaking, most of the people behind bars have committed economic crimes.  Murder and rape account for less than 4% of the total population, according to the FBI.

Prisons illustrate how racial and economic discrimination reinforce one another.  As noted above, prison inmates are drawn from the ranks of the economically marginalized of all races.  As an institution, however, prisons have a far greater impact on communities of color, because of our disproportionate representation in prison populations.

With local and national economies ailing in most parts of the country, local and national “leaders” often see a potential state or federal prison as a recession-proof economic base.  In fact, prisons are more than “recession-proof:” they are the one industry next to the war machine that greatly benefits from “recession” (depression).

Prisons are filled with unemployed people of color from the inner cities who are being sold as modern day slaves to economically depressed rural communities all over America as a source of jobs for their growing numbers of unemployed, who are usually poor Whites.  America is putting all of its resources at the wrong end of the system!  History has shown us repeatedly that as long as prisons are built, they will be filled.  Sanctions should exist for criminal behavior but they should not depend on warehousing hundreds of thousands of people.  Warehousing will stop only when it is no longer available as an option.

Prisons do not protect society from crime!  Instead, they avoid the far more challenging solution of economic injustice by reinforcing patterns of economic and social inequality.  It is only by discouraging reliance on incarceration that we can seek humane and democratic ways to make our communities healthy, productive, and most of all, safe places to live.

To anyone reading this article I strongly encourage you to further research the issues I’ve written about on your own.  The Internet is a good place to begin.  Your public libraries along with organizations that are concerned about prison rights/human rights are the other excellent sources for insight into the issues I’ve written about.

Back

Home/Cover/Table of Contents