Once I remarked to a nice liberal person (long before I came back to Montana) about one of the recurring news stories giving statistics about the overwhelming number of people in jail in the United States, disproportionately minorities, immigrants, males, drugs users, and so on. I thought this was an indicator that as a society we were doing something wrong. But the nice liberal person had no use for anyone anywhere whom any court had sentenced. They were believers in inerrant courts. Their defense was that in other countries lawbreakers were killed, so that’s why they didn’t show up in prison statistics. I’ve pondered that ever since.
It seems clear to me that prison is also deadly, though recently a story claimed that black men in prison live longer than black men on the streets. That might be true of Native Americans as well. But a body walking around can be dead. A body living on macaroni and low-quality cheese for years and years, locked into a solitary cell or crammed into a cell too small for the number of people, constantly exposed to danger from guards and other inmates, then one day dumped back into the general population with no money, no job, one set of clothes, broken family relationships -- is such a person still a functioning human? No wonder they are so good at committing suicide in jail. I haven’t seen statistics on how many commit suicide soon after release.
There are two sets of people that nice liberals mostly agree shouldn’t be sent to jail. One is the mentally ill (I mean the ones who were deranged BEFORE they were sent to jail, not driven mad while in there) and the other is children. We’re on the fence about illegal immigrants, but reasonable people would have to admit that being “legal immigrants” is a category with moving edges and if the person in question “looks” like an illegal immigrant, they are likely to be treated as one.
Our society has a great reluctance to straightforwardly kill people in our own country, though we will send predator drones to eliminate whole families in other countries. Instead we incarcerate people at great damage to them, enormous tax cost, and little effectiveness in preventing crime or providing rehabilitation. Sometimes the original crime is minor, only criminalized in one local jurisdiction, never really investigated, and defended by incompetents. This makes no sense. Why do we do it?
Partly, of course, it’s the money. We are “farming” the vulnerable, not just in prison but also in a swarm of institutions originally organized to protect these same people: nursing homes, reform schools, drug rehab, group homes, shelters for the homeless. At one time these were created by government as part of the people’s service to the people -- no less a communal effort than the national highway system. The money that was meant to be allocated for supporting these institutions has attracted sub-contractors who skim as much profit as possible and leave only enough to keep the people alive who justify the system. Technically alive.
These sub-contractors, often national and quite powerful, employ clever lobbyists who rig state and national laws to help keep those institutions full and prevent full disclosure of what goes on there, particularly the bookkeeping. Unless people have a family member who has gone to jail or is in a nursing home or is seriously retarded or put into a foster home, no one makes a public outcry because of the stigma so often attached to the vulnerable. They “deserve” neglect. Of course, there are always determined groups of folks working in the opposite direction, trying hard to enlighten us all in the name of positive change. Many of the captured people are vulnerable because they have no voice, maybe even literally, and cannot tell you what happens to them behind closed doors. Sometimes the victims don’t even realize that anything is happening to them or that it is wrong.
Laws in the United States or elsewhere are in levels and overlaps. Treaty law is the highest, then federal, then state, then local -- but there is another level or set of levels beneath that: regulations, inspectors, supervisors. At that level change is even harder. Again the insanity of laws passed by out-of-touch fat cats in Armani suits cruising our capitols in limos, pretending they are legislating (when actually the laws they propose are researched and written by their staffs who will lose their jobs if they fail to get the boss re-elected).
We know a great deal about how to address social problems including families failing to protect and guide their children; the inappropriate use of force against children or women or the elderly; sexual abuse; substance abuse; and a huge range of physical problems like dementia, PTSD, diabetes, blindness, HIV-AIDS, TB, Hep C. ALL of them demand money, time and attention. But they don’t get it. Why is that? We don’t kill people but we don’t cure them either -- we warehouse them or we leave them to wander the streets, spreading the very diseases that cause them to be stigmatized but not stigmatized enough to prevent losers from catching their afflictions.
The efforts of savvy people to make sure justice is brought to bear can only do it through convoluted, time-consuming, inaccessible and expensive courts and systems meant to sort and deport in timely fashion, but the system itself is in shackles because there isn’t enough money nor enough competent people. Pointing this out does not mean that the general public will authorize enough money to do what they expect to be done. They figure they have their own troubles. A person who is really invested in justice will not be elected nor even appointed and, yes, I’m including the US Supreme Court. Decisions are made on the basis of strategy, consequences -- to them and “their” people, not some helpless and lost person in the system, whether a disruptive and ornery child or an old sick black man who smoked too much weed in the Sixties and has been in prison ever since.
During my decade in the ministry I found it a major challenge to be the representative of moral inquiry. I had more power and legitimacy when I was an animal control officer on the street -- but slightly less than as an English teacher in a classroom. Somehow moral reflection has been replaced by criminalization, power and money, which in turn have become the very definition of success. Perhaps at last we have come to a turning point, signaled if not signified by replacing an opulent Pope with one who takes St. Francis as a role model. Maybe the burden of all these semi-secret, self-righteous, often force-based enclaves of captives will fall of their own ineffective weight, releasing generations of desperate people. Then we will have to pray for survival and forgiveness. But to whom? We used to think about God’s law, but now we have no use for the least of us -- regardless of what Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha might have said.
Still, not everyone is cynical. There are always a few good people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/creative-writing-in-a-massachusetts-prison.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20130614&_r=0
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