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Mar

3

Thoughts on Prisons

Filed Under heteropatriarchy, media, rants, sadness

I had the misfortune of seeing a few minutes of an MSNBC show about prisons. It was about “dangerous” teenagers in jail. I got to see a young man be pepper-sprayed and then face planted by four guards for kicking a door and resisting going into segregation. Something about the way prison was depicted in this show - and in a previous episode that I watched with my grandmother the other day - dismayed me. It was a flat portrayal - no analysis, no critical eye, no reflection … just a paint by numbers depiction of how tough and scary working in a prison is.

I’ve been in prisons before; it’s not fun. It’s not a place you want to be, even as a visitor. But didn’t it disturb anyone else - the people making this show - to see a teenage boy on the floor groaning while grown men called out “get the shackles?” And “decontamination” showers. What are we doing here? What is the point?

The LH says that he’d like to see prisons operate on a completely different model. Right now they are run like schools; but perhaps instead they could get funding based on how well they rehabilitate. Prisons who churn out repeat offenders lose funding, and lose inmates. Competition can be a good thing; the people running prisons would be motivated to do a better job. As it stands today, it’s actually good for prisons when someone gets locked up again, and again, and again. Hey, who says crime doesn’t pay?

Comments

3 Responses to “Thoughts on Prisons”

Stentor on March 4th, 2008 8:47 am

I completely agree that prisons are often abusive and counterproductive (I hear awful stories from my wife all the time), and that we should move to a rehabilitation-based policy. The problem with competition between prisons is that we don’t have enough bed space for all the people we want to lock up as it is. And it could lead to strategies by which some prisons are able to get themselves all the “good” prisoners who are (percieved, rightly or wrongly, to be) more rehabilitatable. Also, pushing for rehabilitation-based policies does not prove that the policymaker has a large penis (demonstrating penis size is an important function of modern criminal law).
Robin Edgar on March 4th, 2008 9:04 am

“The problem with competition between prisons is that we don’t have enough bed space for all the people we want to lock up as it is.”

You mean the United States wants to lock up more than 1% of its population?
Stentor on March 4th, 2008 11:43 pm

Robin: Yup. There are lots of folks on parole not because that was the punishment deemed appropriate for their crime, but because the jails were full so they had to let someone out. They’ve been building new prisons like crazy here in Middle of Nowhere, Arizona to try to keep up.