The Prison Industrial Complex Turns Inmates Into Repeat Customers

What I learned from eleven years in federal prison was that it was a human being warehouse whose only service was to infantilize inmates, rather than to return its inmates with the capability to take their part in civil society.  Compulsory Silence: On the State-Led Suppression of Language in American Prisons (Literary Hub) explains some of the ways prison accomplish this rendering of human beings into creatures needing the structure of prison to survive. Recidivism means job security for the prison industrial complex.

The mental suspension of belief in the prison wall structure, which language and literature relies on by way of its abstract sign system, remains an essential threat to the power of the nation-state to this day. If sentences can be broken, literally and metaphorically, by the imprisoned themselves then the state’s jurisdiction, a favored term of legal power play, has been breached. One might consider this to be the broader rationale behind the Pentagon’s decision to characterize poems written by post-9/11 Guantánamo Bay prisoners a “special risk” to national security, officially barring them as classified information. Held in a military prison in Cuba for years without charges, without due process, and with suppressed literacy, Guantánamo Bay prisoners earmarked as “illegal enemy combatants” and subjected to the tortures of waterboarding on an island surrounded by water miraculously found the means to cling to literature’s hope over and over again.

Only those who had skills to change themselves prior to prison, survived the process of infantilization imposed by the American prison system. Those survivors had education and a middle-class background. Those who lacked education and/or a middle class background became programmed for life in prison. While those without education prior to prison, and who sought to educate themselves, find opposition by the prison system.

Not that any of this is new. The Guardian ran The simple idea that could transform US criminal justice nine year ago.

Newark is a city of 250,000 people, across the Hudson River from New York City. It is marked by high rates of poverty and crime. Victoria F Pratt, chief judge of the Newark Municipal Court, who presides over Part Two, estimates that 85-90% of her defendants have substance abuse problems, and more than 40% have mental health issues. Many have both. These are the people who sleep in the train station, buy small bags of weed or wraps of heroin, or commit petty burglaries. Some have been jailed and released dozens of times – a life sentence served in 30-day instalments. Pratt recently saw one woman with 101 previous arrests.

Part Two is a pioneer of procedural justice, an idea that in recent months has become central to the debate about reforming the US criminal justice system. The idea behind procedural justice is that people are far more likely to obey the law if the justice system does not humiliate them, but treats them fairly and with respect. That begins with the way judges speak to defendants.

***

In other words, an offender is more likely to do what the authorities tell him and refrain from committing further crimes if he feels that he is treated with respect and fairness – regardless of the judge’s ruling. “This discovery has been called ‘counterintuitive’ and even ‘wrongheaded,’” stated a paper published in 2007 by the American Judges Association, “but researcher after researcher has demonstrated that this phenomenon exists”. 

But politicians use crime to mask racism to frighten voters into voting for them. They promise tougher punishments, then when that does not work, they promise even further harsh punishments. They vote for politicians who want to deny due process because they have been pummelled by propaganda that criminals are running amok. 

Kilmar Ábrego García returned from El Salvador to face criminal charges in US (The Guardian)

Sandoval-Moshenberg also said: “This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished – not after.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg said the White House’s treatment of his client was “an abuse of power, not justice”. He called on Ábrego García to face the same immigration judge who had previously granted him a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador “to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent” there.

Why does no one start thinking: what you guys keep doing does not work, so maybe your ideas are wrong?

sch 6/7