The Trouble With Prison

via mw, 27 May 2009:

The Other Death Penalty: LWOP

By KENNETH HARTMAN; May 25, 2009 - Counterpunch

In his Republic, Plato’s allegory of the cave describes how the limited perception of man leaves him measuring the world with only the distorted reflections of reality. The trouble with prison, as it is perceived, is the shadows are further distended by a variety of prisms that bend reality to suit a host of preconceptions, special interests and self-fulfilling prophecies. The end result of this shape-shifting is a system that produces failure as a matter of course, that pretends to protect the mass of society, and that destroys whole communities in its voracious appetite. The trouble with prison is prison.

I serve the other death penalty – life without the possibility of parole – for killing a man in a fistfight when I was 19 years old. In that I will never get out, I am freed to speak a more direct and unfiltered truth than those who must convince a panel of unsympathetic officials they should be returned to the real world. My 29 years of direct experience, coupled with a powerful thirst to come to grips with my own personal truth and gain an intellectually valid grasp of this world, have taught me a series of lessons. While I do not claim to have unchained myself completely from the bonds of ignorance, I believe I can read and interpret accurately the tortured shapes on the dull concrete walls of this particular cave.

People are put in prison because nothing else works. This is the foundational misperception that supports the prison edifice. The truth is far less simple. There are prisoners whose lifetime of dangerous behavior leaves prison as the only choice for society. But these are a tiny minority in the sea of pathetic misfits and perennial losers walking the yards.

Most prisoners are uneducated, riddled with unresolved traumas and ill-treated mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and self-esteem issues that are beyond profound, bordering on the pathological far too often. The vast majority has never received competent health care, mental health care, drug treatment, education or even an opportunity to look at themselves as human. Were any of these far less draconian interventions even tried, before the descent into this wretched cave, no doubt many of my peers would be leading productive lives. Nothing else works is not a statement of fact; it is the declaration of an ideology. This ideology holds that punishment, for the sake of the infliction of pain, is the logical response to all misbehavior. It is also a convenient cover story behind which powerful special interest groups hide.

Prison employees benefit by our failure. This startling fact contains within it a monstrous truth. These well-organized government workers created the victims’ rights movement, a sad shill for the prison-industrial complex. Using the handful of politically active victims of crime to obscure their actual agenda, propositions are passed, laws are changed, and policies that could prevent victimization in the first place are suppressed. Both of these groups, working in tandem with the corporations that supply and construct prisons, pour millions of dollars into the political process to achieve a system guaranteed to fail. But this failure by any other measure – high rates of recidivism, high rates of internal disorder, growing prison populations serving longer sentences – results in greater profits to the corporations, increased membership in the [prison guard & police] unions, and ever growing piles of dollars to buy still more influence.

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