For all the lip service once paid to rehabilitation in this country, imprisonment in America is about nothing but punishment, and punishment is the intentional infliction of pain by those in power upon the less powerful. In the United States we equate justice with vengeance; we embrace the theory of “just deserts” for criminals and deviants. Instead of improving the harsh conditions that create crime and violence, which might restore peace and harmony to our society, we inflict more pain, more punishment, thus creating more crime and more violence.
The get-tough-on-crime attitudes of the ’80s have given us rampant, desperate inner-city crime and violence in the ’90s. If we continue with our vengeful attitude toward criminals (poor minorities, the mentally ill, those who have nothing to lose), the violence will only get worse until there is an all-out war between the haves and the have-nots. Do I overstate? Maybe. For the moment, most violent felons attack people who live near them, who look like them, who share the same social class. Will the crime stay confined? I saw the hate festering in the American gulag all during the ’80s. Now I am watching it spill into the streets.
Today’s politically motivated campaigns to make prison conditions even harsher are so wrongheaded it scares me - not because I fear the conditions have cut back or discontinued other highly effective programs.
To do justice, to break the cycle of violence, to make America safer, prisons need to offer inmates a chance to heal like a human, not merely to heel like a dog. Society is right to expect that prisons w ill promote respect for the dominant culture and our laws. But how? To paraphrase Malcolm X a man who has nothing to lose is a dangerous man. Take away what rights prisoners have and no one will be safe–not the guards, not the police not even the other prisoners.
Prisoners, no matter how heinous their crime, have a right to our compassion a lid understanding, just as their victims have a right to restitution and to healing, just as society has a right: to be protected. Prisoners have a right to hope, they have a right to opportunities that will enable them to change the behavior that led them to crime, and they have a right to re-enter society after they’ve done their time. Prisoners have a right to become welcome members of society instead of brutalized and brutal outcasts.
Strutton is the editor of Prison Life. a bimonthly magazine.
