A slightly different version of this Editor’s Note was first published in The Beat Within about twenty years ago. We are reprinting it here for two reasons. First, we want you to think about all the changes for the better that have happened over the years. For example, there are now a variety of useful programs, from meditation, mindfulness and real psychological counseling, to your ability to take college courses and earn degrees that promise a better future. But, at the same time, much of the criticism of the system we wrote about is as true today as it was 20 years ago, before most of you were born. We hope you can both acknowledge and appreciate the improvements, and, at the same time, continue to call out what still needs to be improved.
And with that, here is what we wrote that long ago:
This week, we were thinking about how difficult it is for young people (and older people, too) getting out of the hall or jail or prison after years of being kept as dependent slaves for long periods of time. Too often marked by lives of deprivation and violence, drugs and alcohol, and physical and emotional abuse and abandonment, they are further stigmatized by the label: ex-con, making it even harder to lead crime-free productive lives in freedom. There are so many things wrong with our policy of incarcerating large number of people for years and years at a time, that it’s hard to know where to start a list.
Our own list of “sins” would include:
Removing boys and men from the gentling effects of girls and women, forcing them to live only in the company of other males, not only preventing the development of decent social skills between the sexes, but also fostering sexual assaults and activity that wouldn’t exist in the free world. Preventing young women (and young men) from bonding with their infant children. Isolating offenders in distant locations, making it difficult if not impossible to maintain family relationships that can spell the difference between success and failure. Failing to provide educational and vocational instruction, setting released prisoners up for failure; and violating parolees and returning them to lockup so routinely and for such minor offenses that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country.
Our system continually squanders its opportunity to improve the lives of those we imprison. Some believe these demonstrated failures are deliberate. Maybe they aren’t failures at all since the individual’s failure guarantees the bureaucracy’s success.
But to us, one of the biggest sins of the system, whether by design or accident, might be called “The Myth of Freedom.” Actually, one of our Beat OGs raised the issue during a Beat topic meeting. He called his topic, “A Faulty Paradise.”
Two things, in particular, led him to describe freedom as a faulty paradise. First, like us, he reads the many pieces we get from young people in the halls who think that their problems will be solved once the doors open and they walk out into the sunshine. The trouble is, as anyone knows who works, pays rent, owns a car, maintains relationships among people of all ages, sexes, races, backgrounds, freedom is not easy. By idealizing freedom as paradise, reality is bound to hit you like an ice-cold bucket of water, setting you up for failure.
Even worse is that the skills prisoners need to survive in the system are negatives in the free world. In jails, prisons and juvenile hall, you are totally dependent that someone feeds you, clothes you, tells you when to go to the bathroom, when to shower, when to go to sleep and get up.
But in the real world, you must provide all these things for yourself. Stripped of virtually all opportunity for choice in the system, you are now required to make virtually all your own decisions, from what kind of toothpaste to buy to how to fill out a resumé. It requires a self-discipline entirely different from the discipline you need as a prisoner.
In juvenile halls, talk is too often described as dead, but far from being dead on the outside, talk is the only way you can be heard, the only way to move from point A to point B.
What incarceration does is go take people out of the real world and put them into a made-up world where self-determination and expression are crushed. Our OG Beat writer put it very well when he wrote this short poem:
You took me away from what I know.
You stripped me of my soul.
How can I be mature
If for six years I didn’t grow?
That’s the heart of it. A system that treats people like bonsai trees, carefully pruned and cut back, unable to grow to their full height and potential, kept small and crippled to allow the institution to operate with minimal disruption. And then, having deprived them of social interaction and self-discovery, the system sets the prisoners free to try to maneuver and manipulate a world that has passed them by using skills that have systematically been stripped away.
And then, to compound the problem, society watches them fail and holds them totally responsible for their failures. When, if we were honest, we would have to turn that negative judgment on ourselves and the system we support with our taxes and our silence.
This hurts our heart and soul because we can so clearly see the devastating results of this shortsighted policy. We don’t know where we’re going with this, but it’s just that sometimes we open our eyes and everything seems so clear. The problems our juvenile and adult justice systems pretend they’re designed to cure actually create new and worse problems for everyone. It seems like a deliberate policy, like saying the United States is free to torture prisoners. No doubt it creates jobs for correctional industries, guards and the makers and sellers of a thousand different products that feed the prison complex. Maybe that’s the trade-off: human lives for dollar profit. It makes us sick to our stomach to think like that, but what else can we think?
Okay, okay, we know. We ain’t gonna solve this problem in our little rant-of-the-day. But still, we can’t help but think that the system is more insane and destructive than any one of its occupants.
Thank you, Michael, for that blast of inspiration from the past. Interesting how some things have changed while so much has stayed the same. How does that reflect on our society and what more will it take to continue for us to make real and everlasting change?