Experiences in the Correctional Facility

Being in the correctional facility for a few months gave me some first person insight into the industrial-prison complex. I am no expert on the subject --- only knowing what I have read and experienced. Being a black young male around a majority of other minority males (most who identified as black) was a very rich experience. There was an initial shock for me that I had almost immediately. I remember thinking to myself, "I have not seen this many young black guys together since High school". Thinking back now I can see how this first reaction is a reflection of our society as it stands now--and now profoundly disheartening that is. On a more personal level, there is nothing more humbling than taking part in their world. Seeing their hopes, desires, and inspirations was awe inspiring. If the measure of a society is how it treats its worst off then yes, we have a way to go. If the measure of an individual is the strength of character given the least desirable circumstances--then a lot of these guys have things most other "privileged" people can only dream of.


First off, there are some differences between the inter-city urban culture and the rural culture that I came from. For example, I have few close neighbors. I grew up in a place where the amount of wildlife easily outnumber people. In fact I remember going days without seeing more than a handful of people and seeing no signs of civilization. This is different for the urban youth --- constantly surrounded by other people, noise, and stimuli. However there are a lot of similarities. Despite being in a city, a lot of inner-city urban youth are often at a disadvantage of obtaining and having access to resources. This is something that constantly plagued me growing up in a rural location. Access to extra-curricular activities, internet, and transportation are some of the apparent ones. I found that the culture was easy for me to relate to, perhaps due to the exportation and assimilation of urban culture in mass media. The language and cultural beliefs were ones that I have experienced in my life to varying extents.


Most of the inmates are not "bad" people at all. It seems that in society we are taught to believe that there is this line, and if you cross this line, then you are a bad seed. From my experience, that line moves based on where you live, what people identify you as, what you sound like, etc. It is more like a gradation. While we have the law it is not written in stone --- and neither are people. A lot of the inmates made a series of what most of society would consider bad choices. They sold drugs, drove while intoxicated, or got into a series of fights out of anger. While in isolation those individual things sound (and are potentially) not the best of choices, we have to remember that no choice (or series of choices) is created in a vacuum. Some of them were selling drugs to escape from poverty. A few of them got into fights due to unresolved trauma. While I am in any way defending actions I am questioning motivation and snap judgment of those motivations. Perhaps I am even questioning myself and what I personally initially thought. I was surprised by my own biases. I view myself as a fairly reasonable and open minded individual. Yet when entering the correctional facility, I could not escape the sense that these individuals somehow "deserved" what they got. These are indeed inmates. They are indeed guilty of some crime. Yes, there are the individuals who have serious issues which require years of treatment. For a good number of them though, I could have easily traded places with them. Given their circumstances, I could not say without a shadow of a doubt that I would have chosen differently. Anyone who says they can are in serious self-denial. But we are raised culturally to believe differently. Perhaps this is what soothes our collective conscious? If they are bad and deserve to be there, then there is no moral grey, no reason to question or feel bad about their imprisonment. We can continue to live with the satisfaction that we have done right --- and that all is ok.


The individual(s) with the extreme personality or mental health issues should questionably not even be in the prison system to begin with. Working there, I saw how incredibly hard it is to treat those individuals within the prison system. Why are we imprisoning our mentally ill? It seems illogical. My supervisor and I met with the head of the Trinidad & Tabego prison system. The way they view mentally ill individual and prisoners are extremely different. They make it a priority to keep mentally ill individuals away from the general prison population, understanding that the treatment approaches are different. And thats another thing.... they actually try to rehibiliate their prisoners for society instead of just locking them away! How revolutionary is that!? I can see the moral reasoning for grouping the two, no matter how hallow.. I can see the logic. But it doesn't take much digging to see the fallacy in the simple argument. The cost highly outweighs the benefits. But it is these human costs--- the value of these lives, that we have written off.


That is the thing that plagued me even more is the stigma that will follow these individuals. Now they have been in jail, they have been branded. For some of them this is well warranted. For others, particually the non-violent (physically) offenders, this will cripple their chances to reform. Even if they desire to change their lives, other circumstances outside of their control are against them. Because we tend to paint prisoners with a wide brush in our country, getting a job with a rap sheet is difficult to do. Access to opportunities and resources are further limited.


There is then the inter-generational transmission effects of incarcerating individuals. I mentioned my reaction to the number of minority young males in the correctional facility. But the fact is that if you are a black male, you have a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated at some point in your life. 1 in 3. That's huge. A recent LA Progressive article makes a more chilling statement:

 “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.
Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve...As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.

“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.” - Dick Price, LA Progressive 

By going to prison, many of these young males see it as a right of passage. They would say, things like, "oh yea, every one I know goes it jail, its no big thing --- it helps my street cred". Many of them had uncles, brothers, cousins, or fathers actively  serving prison sentences, or had in the past.  In a way, being or becoming imprisoned has become a right of passage, something young males in the community just do on the way to becoming an adult. In these communities, there has been created (in a sense) a self-fulfilling need to become incarcerated because it has become culturally relevant to do so. Even if the consequences of being in jail are fully known by these young males (which over and over again I got the sense that they did not understand the long term ramifications) the social construction of becoming a "man" by being incarcerated may be stronger. Thus the damage is two fold on the child --- the absence of the adult in the child's life and the norm set by the adult being incarcerated. Not to say that being in the child's life would automatically be a positive --- but one has to wonder if the abstinence of African American males in the community as positive role models (or perhaps even being there) negatively influences the culture as a whole. It has been said it takes a village to raise a child. If 1/3rd of those villages males are missing then where does that leave the children? 

Don't get me wrong. We have a rule of law. If you break it, you should be punished.Incarceration however has seemed to become the rule of thumb punishment. We have to remember that not everyone who commits a crime is a serious criminal --- there are degrees of crime and there should be degrees of punishment. Thinking that these individuals should have "known better" and that it is all their fault is not the way to go. It has not been working for us. Sending individual to jail as punishment may actually create more criminals. Time after time I kept hearing how being in jail taught certain individuals how to carry out criminal offences more efficiently. They created networks with other, serious criminals. This combined with the social mobility restrictions we place on individuals create a system that helps to generate more criminals.It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy --- we need more prisons because we have more criminals, yet prisons create criminals, and in some circumstances to become a "man" you have to go to prison. Where is the logic in this? 

This is not to mention the mentally ill and how they become victim to this flawed system. I guess it has to go back to how we judge certain offences and the punishment for those offences. Having certain mental illness(es) may make an individual more likely to commit a crime. Instead of throwing this individual in a prison and hoping that the punishment of incarceration will deter future action, getting them the help they need could be a more effective route. Knowing about the social-cultural differences is also a huge plus. 

You know the saddest thing about all of this? Serious crime has actually been dropping over all, yet we incarcerate more people every year: 

"Last year's murder rate may be the lowest since the mid-1960s, according to preliminary statistics released by the Department of Justice. The human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary: had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That's more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq — combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1963761,00.html#ixzz1eZ2LCuEH"

I guess my final thought is: What are we really locking people up for?