Populating Our Prisons

Throughout our history we have attempted to transform lives through the process of incarceration. Our beliefs and goals vary from country to country but the ultimate purpose has been to reform criminals and prepare them for life after imprisonment. Have we done a good job at it? Lets take a glimpse at were the United States stands. Looking back in history and up to the present, we can observe the changes that have occurred with society and our prisons systems. Since the seventies, the prison population has expanded fourfold (Spelman). These changes do not reflect a positive outcome if we are willing to tell ourselves the truth. Prison numbers are growing, we are building new and “more improved” prisons everyday, and the turn around rate among minorities is staggering. Better yet, has imprisonment become another form of enslavement and/or a mega billion dollar industry? This observation allows us to ask the question, “What are we really creating and how far are we willing to go with it?”

How society is affected is only one facet of the whole picture, but it will be highlighted here because of some of the most obvious reason and one being the impact it has made on minority communities. There are also different levels within our society that will be viewed in order to substantiate this charge. The first level will focus on the impact among our family structures and what type of cost is incurred. In this let us look at the question regarding funding that may or may not have been used within communities that are negatively impacted and find out if there were any societal affects. Justice will not be served if we leave out legislative responses to various issues such as race, class, and gender, so these issues will be addressed also.

Secondly, we will note the direction that released men and women have taken once released and conclude whether individuals returning into society can keep up. And finally what alternatives have been used within our society and what new solutions can be used that include a well rounded approach to assist those re-entering this high pace society.

Focusing on how prison have been designed is a realistic place to start when explaining the effects of current prison procedures on society because much of the problems with the confines of prison have a trickle down affect on society. In the past our jails were mainly designed for detaining people accused of crimes pending their trial. It was not until later that prisons were then constructed to hold criminals for longer periods of time. This decision was made when the British society started to move away from corporal punishment and toward imprisonment with the hope of reforming the mind and body. These changes ultimately helped to pave the way for penitentiaries throughout the world and the rest of Europe. This path has also set the standard for our modern day prisons that now use high level technology in addition to the structural set up of our past prisons. Believe it or not ever since the earliest penitentiary, Walnut Street Jail, and its introduction of a permanent structural pattern we have clung to this type of format and have done nothing else but increase it’s capacity. Also for the first time in history within Walnut, the use of imprisonment through solitary confinement as a method of combating crime was introduced. Later in 1820 Sing Sing introduced the method of separation based the degree of their criminal activity, age, gender and even class. As these elements were being put into place there were many mental health professionals and political guidelines put into place that would also set the foundation for what we have today. This is not to say that all of them were bad, but many practices that came into play are still magnified in our jail systems today.

Unlike past we do now separate or men and women, but sadly this does not hold true for juveniles. The process of trying youth as adults has subjected our juveniles to unthinkable environments within our prison walls, only to be turned out into our society as totally different and in many cases no were near rehabilitated (Hsia, Bridges, McHale 2004). Most are lost due to the lack of education and skills needed to obtain a job that will allow them to survive in this new world that they have not been prepared for. Class and race have become an even bigger underlying problem because of legislative bills that now exist that give more time for certain crimes that are related to lower class cultures and excessively less time to it’s counterpart. Many such as prosecutors, district attorneys, judges, inmates, politicians and others are aware that this type of injustice is present, yet it is still happening in and out of our prisons today. For example a person who has five ounces of cocaine versus a person who has five ounces of crack cocaine differs. It shows up in our court rooms as cocaine equals a maximum of five years and crack cocaine has a maximum of a life term with more than 85% of the time being mandatory (McDonald and Carson 1993). It eventually shows up in our prison systems with our majority population being minorities. The worse and most significant reveal is in our urban and minority families who rank the highest among our census with women being the head of household.

Next, let’s reflect on the method of isolation as being a means to reduce crime, we see within new high tech prisons such as SuperMax, located in Colorado, that they offer the most extreme form of “crime reduction” because this facility offers total solitary confinement for all inmates. Based on this type of structure can we even support the notion that isolation is even a true crime reduction method? SuperMax is made up totally of 490 isolation cells. SuperMax holds prisoners such as Omar Abdel-Rahman, Islamist terrorist, involved in World Trade Center bombing planning in 1993, and Wadih el-Hage, conspirator in the 1998 United States embassy bombings and though they are in isolation several attempts have been made to spear head other terrorist acts and there are those who still conducted illegal business while in this facility. This is only one of many super prisons being built at the cost of $60 million dollars or more each. Could it be that we are spending all this money on technology and programs that do not work?

Society may need a wake up call and come to terms with some foreseen realities and admit that we must have more contingency plans that will offer safe guards in our society. Current issues on the table include: 1) New and upcoming technologies that are more advanced than DNA, could free even more individuals than we could imagine and how will we handle those who have been exposed to institutionalized abuses. 2) The fact that more and more laws are being passed, more people are going to jail