Prison Life & Mass Incarceration

 Two different stories in The Guardian touch on America and its prison's.

From Chelsea Manning: ‘I struggle with the so-called free world compared with life in prison’:

... Manning’s voice lowers, loudens and becomes very harsh, as if she is forcing out an unbearable truth. “I struggle every day with the world out here,” she says. There is a long pause. “I have a lot of trouble with this world, this so-called free world, compared with the life that I had in prison.”

Why? “I struggle with the fact that ... I don’t know what tomorrow brings out here. I feel less supported than I did in both the military and in prison. In prison I know that I have housing; I know that I have healthcare; I know that I have food. I don’t feel as secure here. And people are so detached. There is no community. People don’t talk to each other. People don’t say hi to you. People are suspicious of each other.” Her voice rises to a peak. “There’s more community in a prison than there is out here! ... I struggle with it every day.”

 For how long have we known some people need structure and find freedom in prison? Other people create their own structures, they find ways to use the time given them to build and do. I suppose I have structure now: work, writing (when I am not too tired), and sleeping. What I found in prison was irresponsibility. You keep reading this blog, you will see what I did with that irresponsibility.

The other article was Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’:

Today, Annie is tormented by the memory. Polly’s kidnapping and subsequent murder fueled a host of “tough on crime” laws and a powerful victims’ rights movement, which pushed America to have the highest reported incarceration rate in the world.

The meeting at the White House, Annie said, was a reminder of how her family’s story was exploited to expand mass incarceration and racial inequality in America.

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Annie and her older sister Jess are now on a mission to reclaim their family’s legacy and undo the harsh legislation the tragedy that befell them sparked. They say they want a different criminal justice system, one that focuses on preventing violence; accountability, treatment and rehabilitation for people who cause harm; and care and services for survivors.

Their message is urgent, the sisters say, as growing concerns over crime in cities across the US since the pandemic have led to familiar calls for more punitive responses from pundits and some politicians facing midterm elections.

“There’s the trauma of losing Polly and then there’s the trauma of how her death was used to punish other people,” Jess said. “We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else … We’re on the precipice of repeating a really terrible history. And we don’t want people to make the same mistake.”

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By 1994, voters in California had approved the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, which, inspired by the extensive criminal record of Polly’s killer, established life sentences for all felonies if the defendant had two prior convictions for serious or violent offenses.

Versions of the law, which also doubled the sentence length for second strikes, were adopted in 23 other states. In September 1994, Congress passed the notorious federal crime bill, sponsored by then senator Joe Biden, which included a three strikes sentencing provision.

In California, Three Strikes contributed to an explosion in the state’s prison population. More than 7,500 people were sentenced to life in prison within the first decade after it passed, nearly half of them for non-serious and non-violent offenses.

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“There’s an underlying assumption that the thing that victims want is the harshest sentencing for the people who caused harm. And that’s really the only option,” Jess said. “It’s this revengeful ‘eye for an eye’ culture. I’ve come to realize we don’t really have a ‘department of corrections and rehabilitation’. It’s a ‘department of punishment and revenge’.”

I knew the truth of this before my arrest. I kept my mouth shut out of worries of losing business. That is called being a coward. You read my posts under prison life, you decide what prison did what you thought it was to do, if it did as promised by politicians. There exist better means for protecting society. Not one easy solution, but methods taking work. 

sch 10/22/22