NEWS & LETTERS, December 2009
Voices from the Inside Out
Prisons influence the world
by Robert Taliaferro
Torture, class and cultural wars, financial scams-- these are issues we hear about in daily news reports or that visit us each evening in television programming.
During prime time the networks call such issues "compelling drama" or "riveting entertainment," yet for so many in this country--and around the world--these issues are real events that are far from entertainment.
Nowhere is this more true than in U.S. prisons. In one of the ironies of American culture, how people are treated in the community and the issues they must face, often find their roots in prisons.
We live in a social environment that requires multiple levels of dialogue to understand the need to discuss an issue, and then other multiple levels of dialogue to even start to find a solution. Further, we live in a politicized fear-based culture that tends to challenge the need for change.
More often than not, these are the same individuals who challenge the need for discussing a variety of social issues that may be deemed controversial, such as the continued disparity between races, cultures and classes; continued gender disparity issues; and issues relating to discriminatory treatment of individuals due to their sexual orientation, just to name a few.
Prison issues often seem the most controversial, yet it is a necessity to talk about prisons and the men, women and children who populate them because they are the testing grounds for many policies, practices and procedures which find their way to the general public.
Feodor Dostoyevsky wrote, "The degree of civilization in a society is best judged by entering its prisons." It is this concept that Charles Dickens considered when he visited Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and was appalled by the treatment of prisoners. His commentary helped spark the movement which eventually closed that prison.
One of the ironies of U.S. jurisprudence, however, is that the same Victorian ethics which found the conditions in prison to be barbaric was sold a bill of goods in developing the electric chair as a "humane" form of execution.
Today we should not be surprised that torture was used in the "war on terror," as it has been a part of the criminal justice process in this country for decades.
Sleep and sensory deprivation, the use of stress positions, degradation--these are all processes that are used on a daily basis in police departments and prisons around the country. Any Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch report will indicate that torture is not restricted to U.S. police agencies or prisons. But there is a level of refinement that the issue receives in the U.S. as prisons try to keep such events hidden.
Yet torture is only one part of the U.S. prison experience that finds its way to the community. Lobbies for universal DNA testing, national identity cards and implanted GPS tracking devices for humans, all have their foundations in the Prison Industrial Complex.
Prisons, administrators and legislatures have also--in the interest of "protecting the public"--been harbingers of other criminal actions for years. From financial scams that are much more sophisticated than a country warden skimming money from the Inmate Welfare Fund, to prison staff who knowingly promulgate class and cultural problems inside of prisons so that tensions result in overtime, these children of capitalism are used as weapons of fear to arm disparity within the community, thus strengthening the impact and dissonance of the prison industrial complex.
In the Oct.-Nov. News & Letters, Georgiana Stewart writes about the corruption one finds in California prisons, and Gerry Emmett writes about the growing fascism that is grounded in U.S. racism. Seemingly dissimilar in scope, we come to realize that each separate issue allows the other to exist.
"Capitalism," wrote Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, "inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest."
It is this social unrest that breeds both contempt and revolutionary thoughts and processes that must be made into practical solutions if we are to change compelling dramas and riveting entertainment, into flesh and blood social transactions that reforms disparity and fear-based governance, and creates the tactile foundation of democracy.
John Ruskin noted that a reformation of our educational system would go far to create the means by which we would be able to change the way that we use our prisons, and that is one direction to follow.
Perhaps the best solution is to not go into the process of change like some defeated warriors seeking to win at something that could have been solved, not by legislated criminality that is said to be lawful, but by forming a political community that demands accountability from its citizens, and even more so from those who are delegated to both create and interpret the law.
We all live in the generation that has witnessed one of the biggest changes in U.S. history. We need to ensure that its effects are more far-reaching, equitable, and universal.
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