What are the purposes of our prisons?
If you’re reading this, you’re likely already a believer in the need for criminal justice reform, but I pose the question all the same. I’ve heard 2 competing claims: that we’re here to be rehabilitated so that we can return to society healthy, whole, productive participants in American society; or to keep violently dangerous people from harming innocent civilians and to provide a deterrent to those who might commit a future crime. They say that this is why our high-security facilities are ‘penitentiaries’ (places where a penitent goes) and the lower are ‘correctional institutions’ (where one’s behavioral issues are ‘corrected’). But there is no differentiation between inmates at the time of sentencing. The differentiation is made by case managers, and that completely controls what kind of facility you spend your life in. Due to a bookkeeping error (and the willful, even joyous, malfeasance of my case manager when I first arrived), I ended up here instead of at the ‘low’ in Sandstone, and I fell apart so quickly here that that opportunity has been dangled just out of my grasp for going on a decade now.
When I was sentenced, the judge and my lawyer both encouraged me do as much programing as possible. I had dreams of getting my degree while here, writing a couple of books, and coming out as wildly successful as the people in these misleading newsletters Michael Santos keeps putting out. By the way, I’m getting tired of hearing how he can take a $20,000 hit in ONE DAY but that this company doesn’t have the resources to help people in facilities like mine. $20,000 has the power to completely change my life, and he’s playing with it on speculative investments like it doesn’t matter. White-collar (obviously) and even drug criminals – even though they go out and intentionally get people strung out on cheap dope, then use that dope to try to those people as objects to serve their needs – are treated much better than SO’s who are incarcerated for decades-plus for clicking on a link maintained by the FBI. This facility is an SO heavy facility, and the staff do NOT treat us the same. If you have a sex case: you can’t get jobs in facilities , laundry, commissary, or most program areas – which pay the best and have the most freedom; you will not get ‘selected’ for any high end programing like ceramics, leathercraft, Vo Tech classes, ect; your unit team will not respond to your requests in a timely matter; you will have to stand in line to eat every single meal since you only have 6 tables you are allowed to sit at, even when the dining hall is 75% empty; you cannot participate in league sports. This facility is run as a penitentiary for SO’s, and an FCI for everyone else. The extremely limited resources – those not wasted on embezzlement and staff parties – are ear-marked for gang-members and white supremacists. I wish I could tell you that was a spiteful overstatement, but it’s the reality I’ve had to live for close to a decade now. I wasn’t even allowed to watch TV until a year or so ago! The guards here are just babysitters who allow the inmates to control the institutions and to bully, extort, and abuse half the population.
This comes back to my original point. Why are there so many SO’s in our prisons? What’s the point? Is it really to rehabilitate? Is it to punish? Is it to deter?
I think, at this point, the most honest answer is that the system doesn’t really know what it’s trying to do anymore, that it no longer HAS a purpose beyond keeping one step ahead of catastrophe. The system needs a complete overhaul, because our USPs are just killing grounds, and our FCI’s are criminal hotbeds – I didn’t know how to make meth before I got here, but it’s one of the many things I’ve been taught against my will while here. I’ve learned how to make do, how to work with those that want to harm me, how to survive in hostile situations when the ones responsible for helping me are – at best – uncaring, or even antagonists. This whole system does nothing but make one a ‘better’ criminal, unless you spend every moment of every day trying to do something else, something better. You slip for a moment, you screw up ONE time, and the wolves will be at your heels – inmate and officer both. As someone who struggled with drugs for too long here, I’m still trying to shake the burden that that put on me. Even as I begged for help in the depths of my addiction, I was told that there was nothing they could do for me.
Read that again.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons doesn’t know how to treat someone with addiction.
So WHAT is the point of our prisons again??????
We warehouse people, make some money off of them, and make a good stat sheet.
But we’re PEOPLE.
And most of us will be coming back to your neighborhood sometime real soon.
We need a complete overhaul of this system, and that has to start from the outside.
Speak up. Quit putting the burden on the shoulders of those barely struggling through each day on the inside and do something yourself, if you want to continue to pretend to care. I don’t even have the right to vote right now. Nothing will ever change if we’re too scared to speak the truth.
What will it take for you to speak out?
