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BS ‘n’ About…
Prison Reform
In the country that we sing about in our patriotic songs, sending people to prison ought to be the last option, not the first. It ought to serve a nobler purpose than helping some politician get re-elected because he is tough on crime. A government ‘by and for the people’ should not have bulging prisons filled with millions of its citizens. A government ‘by and for the people’ should not be warehousing its offenders without a trial and no pretense of rehabilitation. There is no single aspect of America so at odds with everything we are indoctrinated to think we stand for than our penal system.
Prisons have been a part of society since the first hunter-gatherers banded together to form a community. But what has been their historical purpose in the grand scheme of human culture?
First and foremost, they segregate those of our fellow citizens who are a clear and present danger to the rest of us. Second, they provide a deterrent to those citizens who are considering breaking the laws of the society. Third, they provide an opportunity to rehabilitate offenders and return them to society as good citizens. Lastly, they provide a means for the government to keep a Damocles sword hanging over the heads of its citizenry, thereby quashing dissent.
Sadly, a strong case can be made that we are failing miserably at the first three objectives, while succeeding perhaps a bit too well at the fourth. Let us examine each of these objectives of a prison system as they apply to 21st Century America.
Let us start with the segregation of those who provide a clear and present danger to the rest of us. All of us agree on the need to be protected from the proven serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, and terrorists. We’d also like to see behind bars the major crime bosses, gang lords, and the worst of Wall Street’s abusers. These are the guys we need to be protected from. Unfortunately, our quantity versus quality justice system is so overwhelmed by the little guys that way too many of the big guys slip through the cracks.
How do the Mafia crime bosses and Drug Lords manage to stay on the streets: By using high-priced lawyers to exploit legal loopholes that only the rich can afford. A District Attorney would rather cheat a hundred little guys out of a jury, plea bargain them into prison, and bat a thousand, than spend a year in court fighting Dream Team lawyers who have been besting them since the first year of law school. That’s suicide for the old political career.
How does a monster like Garrido manage to be a sex offender on supervised probation, yet have his own underage harem living in tents in his back yard: Because we are approaching one million registered sex offenders in America and his probation officer was up to his eyeballs in guys who took a pee behind a bar or logged onto the wrong government-sting website.
How does the underpants bomber manage to fry his balls off on approach to Detroit International: Because the TSA was busy stripping grandma buck-naked before her flight to Poughkeepsie to see the grandkids.
We are about a half of a generation away from everyone in America being a felon for clicking on the wrong website, running one too many redlight cams, attending one too many Tea Party rallies, failing to buy health insurance, or smoking the stuff that doesn’t have the government-approved tax sticker on it.
Yet we never prosecute the Big Guys: The Wall Street rapists, the Congressional diddlers, the Defense Contractor con men, nor the black ops budgets where the porn and drug bucks stop. Our prisons bulge, yet those most responsible for presiding over the decline of America as we know it, those who most represent a clear and present danger to the rest of us, are still giving themselves fat bonuses and running for re-election. In conclusion, we are failing miserably at protecting America from those who present a clear and present danger to everything she so recently stood for.
Moving on to the claim that prisons provide a deterrent to crime, there is one huge piece of evidence to dispute the claim: Our prisons are bulging at the seams and our courts are so backlogged that Congress can’t write enough Homeland Security checks to keep up with the demand.
We raise our kids to not lie, cheat, or steal. Dare they do so and it becomes Hell Week for the family with beatings, groundings, and screaming matches. Yet our politician heroes lie, our sports heroes cheat, and our business heroes steal. They are caught on a daily basis.
We’ve declared a hypocritical war on the non-government approved drugs, yet they pervade our society at every level. Our kids see them in their neighborhoods, schools, and homes. ‘Just say No to Drugs!’
We throw otherwise law-abiding citizens into prison for up to twenty years for joining the wrong underage website, yet do nothing to the ISPs, Visa, and the other Fortune 500 enablers without which that access would have been impossible. At virtually every level of crime in America we are quick to throw in to prison those who are spending the money while turning a blind eye to those who are raking it in.
Prisons cannot hope to provide a deterrent amidst so much hypocrisy. Prison cannot hope to provide a deterrent in a society where virtually every one of us bends the rules on a daily basis. Nor can it work when seen as a “Do as I say, not as I do” system. We see the movie stars, the athletes, and the politicians break the law and get slapped on the wrist. Our kids see it too. Then if we spank them for stealing, they call the cops and we, the parents get thrown in jail. Justice in America is a mess.
Things that would have outraged us not all that long ago are now just business as usual. We ruined Richard Nixon for stuff that wouldn’t even get covered by Fox News today. Had Willie Mays been caught doing a Barry Bonds, we would have stripped him of every record and sentenced him to a Mississippi chain gang. Had Lindsay Lohan gotten caught back in the day, we would have actually forced her to get some help for herself. Prison is only a deterrent in a society that has respect for the law. Is it any wonder that we don’t?
As for prisons providing rehabilitation, that is no longer official Bureau of Prisons policy. These days, prisons are about warehousing offenders, as stated in official policy. But, without rehabilitation as a goal, what can possibly be the purpose of locking someone up? If a rapist is locked up for twenty years and nothing is done about his ‘issues’, then aren’t we just releasing the same ‘clear and present danger’ back to society, twenty years removed?
If we send an unskilled, uneducated gang-banger dime-bag salesman away for a decade, then don’t educate him or give him skills, aren’t we just returning a dime-bag salesman to his neighbors upon release?
Prison without rehabilitation serves virtually no purpose for the inmate, the inmate’s family, the inmate’s neighbors, or society at large. All it does is waste massive amounts of tax dollars, both directly and indirectly, and, like national debt, pass the problem down to the kids and grandkids. Once branded a felon, these folks will, in one way or another, be a burden on society for the rest of their lives. Prison without rehabilitation is a failed penal system. It creates more problems than it solves.
Patriot Act America has put a pedophile in every neighborhood, a terrorist on every airplane, and a federal agent in every living room. Crises are at an all-time high, yet dissent is at an all-time low. We are so busy being afraid of our neighbors that we don’t have any time to address any of the real issues. We, the People cringe in our living rooms, deer in the headlights, as Homeland Security stares back at us with its spyware and RFIDs.
America’s concept of prisons needs to change before technology and government self-interest turns each and every one of us into a felon. We’ve become a nation of cheaters, liars, and perverts. We’ve become a nation of eighteen year olds with a twenty-year prison term worth of sexting downloads on our cellphones. Who needs the draft when you have cyber-blackmail!
America needs to start playing by the rules again, respecting the right values again, and start using our prisons for their right and lawful purpose. We need to quit locking up millions of our fellow citizens for the personal lifestyle choices they make or we can’t hope to call ourselves a free country.
To that end, we need to re-define exactly what constitutes a ‘clear and present danger’ to American society as a whole: Who destroyed more American families this past decade, the biggest heroin kingpin in LA, or the greedy Wall Street banker who wiped out our IRAs? Who serves as the bigger danger to our kids, the Star Trek geeks who logged onto the wrong kiddie porn website, or the defense contractors who flushed a century of wealth down the toilet in the greedy pursuit of profit? Who is the bigger criminal, the twenty-five year old who refuses to buy health insurance or the health industry that charges two thousand dollars for a two-mile ambulance ride?
We need to protect ourselves from the serial killers but we also need to protect ourselves from the guys who train-wrecked the economy, then had the audacity to ask for a taxpayer bailout to cover their billions in bonuses. We need to protect ourselves from the sexual deviants, but we also need to protect ourselves from the politicians who represent only their own self-interest. We need to protect ourselves from the gang bangers, but we also need protection from being marched off to yet another war that only Wall Street understands.
That’s what prisons are for: If we had locked up a bunch of the liars, cheats, and thieves last time around, we probably wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today.
Congress and the courts have thrown generations of the little guys into prison, without ever really working their way up the food chain to the bigger fish. It is a process that insults the equalities implied by our Constitution, not to mention the passions that fueled our Founding Fathers.
We have thrown enough young black men into prison to devastate black culture for generations to come. Every young black man sentenced is a family sentenced, a neighborhood sentenced, and a future sentenced. Every young man sentenced is a family shredded, a hope for college shattered, and a lifetime of poverty perpetuated.
Is it any wonder that these men become what we so conveniently call ‘institutionalized’? Life on the inside is easy: Three hots, a cot, rec facilities, sports leagues, 24/7 TV, and a fifteen minute a day job. Life on the outside is hard: A baby Mama or two, a minimum wage job, vices on every corner, and a ball-and-chain of a criminal record.
This needs to change. Prison needs to be, not harsher, but harder. It is certainly defeating the purpose by making life on the inside easier than the one awaiting upon release.
At the very least, each prisoner should be paying his own way. After all, that’s how it works on the outside. Prisoners with special skills should be given the opportunity to use these. Those without special skills should be taught some. The quality of each individual inmate’s life should be directly tied to the amount of effort put into it.
Every privilege the inmate receives, this side of ‘bread & water’, should be earned: from rec yard access to dessert, from entertainment to job assignments, should be tied to some kind of individualized program established to rehabilitate that inmate and cover the costs of incarceration. Let there be a lot more options than exist today, but put some kind of ‘price tag’ on almost every one of them. That’s how the real world works: Pay as you go. It would be a good life lesson and prepare the inmate the responsibilities awaiting him on the outside.
The biggest problem with politicians is that they spend our money as if we grew it on trees just for them. They make short-term self-interested decisions and promises that burden us taxpayers for generations. Once someone is locked away, there is no going back, and the prices for that decision reverberate for generations. Does ten years provide twice the deterrent of five years? Does branding someone who is unlikely to repeat a felon for life without a second chance really do a service to society as a whole? Does removing juries from the process respect the Constitution?
Prison should be the absolute last resort. In a free and democratic society, virtually everybody deserves a second chance. When one of our young people does something stupid, we ought to be sentencing them to an opportunity to learn from their mistake, not branding them a societal outcast. Sentence them to school or a job with the threat of incarceration hanging over their heads. It may have been just the incentive they needed. Pair them up with a mentor from the community and give them the guidance they’d been lacking. Put an ankle bracelet and force them onto positive pathways. Garnish their wages and force them to make restitution for the wrongs they may have committed. Let them pay for the wrong they committed, not us.
Use the military to instill some pride and discipline in those who were raised without it. Force offenders to relocate away from the neighborhoods, friends, and influences that keep drawing them back to crime. This may seem harsh, but not when compared with locking someone up and shackling them with a record for the rest of their lives. All of the alternatives to incarceration mentioned in the last few paragraphs result in a penalty, a deterrent, and rehabilitation without the onerous prices of incarceration. They would be ‘tough on crime’ without being tough on tax dollars.
What we are doing isn’t working. We, the American people have lost respect for our justice system and the unfair way its penalties are applied. Let us take a look at the baseball steroids scandal as a microcosm of everything that is wrong with it.
Anyone who took steroids not only provided a ‘clear and present danger’ to the integrity of the game, they also broke the law. Baseball has a huge list of those who failed their drug tests, thus breaking the law, yet not a single one of them has ever spent a day in prison. However, the reporters who broke the Barry Bonds story were thrown in jail for not snitching out their sources. As was the trainer who supposedly sold them to him, not for selling drugs, but again for not ratting him out. The little guys rot in their prison cells for daring to have integrity while the big guys use lawyers to lie their way past congress to sleep soundly in their mansions.
The system failed. We didn’t remove the abusers. We provided no deterrent. And we certainly didn’t rehabilitate anyone. However, the government did make a rather large statement against the peons, abettors, and whistleblowers. That’ll teach ‘em!
And what about the kiddies, Washington’s tear-jerker of an excuse for everything these days? Every high school athlete in America learned that if you cheat and don’t get caught it could be worth up to a hundred million dollars. It worked for Bonds and Clemens: You can’t be the best anymore if you don’t cheat.
What we should have done is throw the first cheaters caught into jail for a good stretch and fined them an amount equal to the value of the ill-gotten, steroid enhanced contracts they signed. Then we should have sentenced them to about ten years worth of community service ‘with the kiddies’. Shoeless Joe their asses and there would be no steroids problem in baseball. But that America is dead.
Our prison system is broken. Like many of the other hypocrisies in this supposedly free country of ours, all it does is emphasize the yawning chasm between us and them, between the haves and the have-nots. Prison is all about respect. Washington would do well to remember that. That and the fact that the Bastille was a prison. Vive la Liberte!
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