Prison Miscellany

A few notes from The Baller's The Classroom and the Cell Who benefits from prison education. Which is Daniel Fernandez's review of Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison by Chris Hedges.  

Advocates of these programs pointed to many encouraging signs: improved morale among people in prison, lower rates of violence, and a much-reduced chance that those earning a college degree would be incarcerated again. Among Mellon’s beneficiaries was NJ-STEP, a program that the journalist Chris Hedges has taught in for several years. A former foreign correspondent at the New York Times, Hedges has spent much of this century reporting domestically, from the frontlines of an ailing and increasingly anomic America. His latest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an America Prison, uses these teaching experiences as a window into our country’s vast penal system, which he once described as exemplifying “the perfect world of the corporate state and what they want to do to the rest of us.” 

...Of the six hundred thousand or so people released from prison each year, more than half will return within thirty-six months. Those who do not are likely to experience a severely diminished quality of life: a 2020 study led by the economist Joseph Stiglitz found that formerly incarcerated people bring home just $6,700 in income on average each year. The racial dimensions of these trends are predictably devastating. For the last twenty years, young Black men have been more likely to receive a prison sentence than a degree from a four-year college or university, making incarceration what sociologists call a “modal life event.”

***

 "There is another lesson that Our Class makes clear, too: being impressed with people is not any way to achieve lasting justice. In the final analysis, such awed sentiments may even prove a dangerous distraction. But if it’s true that prison education cannot change prisons, I’m not sure I could renounce it given a second chance. I don’t want to overstate my faith in these programs—or the people who run them. And I cannot emphasize enough what a disquieting place the classroom can be: neither of the prison, nor entirely free of its rules and regulations, its disastrous desire for concessions and its coercive habits of thought. Still, I’d like to think that even that purgatory was something of a reprieve for my students, a place where we could find new ways to look at one another and become more aware of how we might use our talents to care for one another, to grow, and to create change, even amid conditions so hostile to human flourishing.

I do so agree with the last sentence of that last quote while also thinking the people of this country want only to continue dehumanizing the incarcerated.

Meanwhile, PEN America publishes THE SENTENCES THAT CREATE US:

A road map for incarcerated people and their allies to have a thriving writing life behind bars—and shared beyond the walls—that draws on the unique insights of more than fifty contributors, most themselves justice-involved, to offer advice, inspiration and resources.

And for something different:  Ransomware locks down prison, knocks systems offline:

Inmates were made to stay in their cells as the ransomware outbreak reportedly not only knocked out the establishment's internet but also locked staff out of data management servers and security camera networks. 

The incident came to light in court documents, with one public defender representing the inmates suggesting that their constitutional rights were violated due to the sudden lockdown, which also meant that visitations were canceled.

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