HARDENING THE HEART

PRISONS – UNGODLY!
A Hard Place

By Ike Griffin


Prisons, by design, are built to isolate wrongdoers from society. For the majority of the voting public isolation is the acceptable goal of criminal justice systems. Abandoned is the general practice of optimistically referring to prison in optimistic terms like reformatory or penitentiary. “Corrections” has lost its meaning in relation to what is expected of the department. Expectation wanes that the correctional system will or can correct behavior or address rehabilitation. The expected function of the Criminal Justice system has been reduced to that of assuring citizenry that wrongdoers will be separated from the good people of our society. Nothing more is really required. We do not want prisons in our back yards and we do not want wrongdoers living among us. Following this dictum of the voting public, corrections in America has tried to build enough prisons in remote locations to warehouse wrongdoers.

At the same time, mandatory minimum sentences were established for judges to impose for specified crimes, and sever limitations were placed on “gain time” earned by prisoners for good behavior. Prison sentences have been lengthened to a point where prison construction threatens state budgets and there is an emerging public awareness that visible government programs, such as education and care for elderly, that have strong voiced constituencies, are being curtailed because of funding demands for corrections, a largely invisible function of the government wii a mute constituency. Resentment against public funds expended on prisoners has been a natural consequence. Finite tax revenues are spread over governmental functions, and when expenditures for incarceration began to equal that spent on education, resentment erupted into demands for more Spartan treatment of prisoners.

Critical choices had to be made against applying money for rehabilitative programs for inmates in favor of holding a growing, and aging number of offenders isolated from society, portending disastrous long-term consequences. Intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy sits squarely at the end of that road because almost all these offenders will return to society, worse off than when they left.

UNGODLY PLACES

Isolation is the core contributor to prisons being ungodly places. The creator made us in such a way that we thrive in community, and conversely we wither and die in isolation. One might surmise that since prisons are notoriously overcrowded, real isolation should be impossible. Such is not the case. Most residents in prisons do not even know one another’s names. They know someone’s “handle” or a rumor about another prisoner, but intimacy in prison is discouraged and even prohibited. For many years, it was against prison policy for prisoners to converse with one another. Congregation rules were, and are, strictly enforced. A popular parody on scripture concerning prison life says, “Where two or three prisoners are gathered together for any purpose, an officer will be there amongst them.”

Pictures from the 19th century show prisoners walking single file in a large circle in the exercise yard wearing blinkers that prevent them from seeing anywhere accept straight ahead. Even today in the United States there is a tendency in prisons for the residents to not look one another in the eye, to not acknowledge a glance, be it friendly or hostile. One often sees residents standing side-by-side carrying on a conversation without glancing at one another, holding their gaze straight ahead. Neither are prisoners expected to touch one another except in violence. Isolation is built into the ethos of the system, drawing the residents ever deeper into a dark pit of lonely solitude, eroding their souls. State-of-the-art electronically operated super-max prisons are models of sterile isolation. The cruelest examples of these prisons are built completely underground, thus not only isolating the prisoner from other people, but from nature as well. Gone are glimpses of sky, clouds, birds and occasional animals. Present are the hardest and most durable of human manufacture; concrete, iron, tile, stainless steel. Prisons are ungodly places by design.

Isolation does not just apply inmate to inmate. Prisons have rules discouraging rebuilding relationships with family and loved ones in the free world. It is against federal prison rules and most state prison rules for prison volunteers to have contact with the family of the inmates with whom they are working inside the prison. These rules were formulated in pursuit of efforts to eliminate negative alliances, i.e. escape plots, illegal commerce, etc., and they are justified as such. Sweeping everything into the same trashcan, they effectively eliminate efforts to rebuild positive support structures as well.

Most prison volunteers are religious volunteers. Prison personnel say that eighty-to-ninety percent of all volunteers who come into a prison represent one religious faith or another. Ram Cnaan of the University of Pennsylvania, writing for a study done on the correlation of church attendance and social volunteerism, verified the belief
“…that religious organizations and ‘relationships related to religion’ are clearly the major forces mobilizing volunteers in America. Even a third of secular volunteers – people who did not volunteer for specifically religious activities – relate their service ‘to the influence of a relationship based on their religion.’ Sacred places, it seems, serve civic purposes.” BROOKINGS REVIEW, What’s God Got To Do With The American Experiment? By E.J. Dionne, Jr., and John J. DiIulio, Jr., page 6

At the same time, these volunteers are prohibited from having contact with family members of the incarcerated. Since God wills us for community and religious volunteers feel drawn to help heal relational wounds hindering the growth of isolated inmates’ souls, and since volunteers are prohibited that role, we see how prisons tend to be ungodly places.

Gangs are by far the most prevalent social structure in prisons. Gangs have become so pervasive in the prison culture that several states have built gang-control prisons where movement and communication are further restricted. Spontaneous gangs are invented and formed stemming from a deep need for belonging, a need shared by all humanity. Given the environment from which they find root, the vast majority of these gangs, these sub-cultures, are negative in nature, further refining and dividing the residents. Blacks isolate from whites, whites from Hispanics, Hispanics from Asians. Christians hold contempt for Jews and Islamics, heterosexuals hate homosexuals, achievers loathe underachievers, and on and on.

Prisons thus become negative sub-cultures where the strong intimidate the weak. Love is held in contempt. Warmth, relationship and kindness are relentlessly squeezed out of prisoners in a continuing downward spiral of depression, desperation and destruction. Prisons become schools of crime and incubators of more crime.


OPPORTUNITY AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY

Michael Quinlan, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told me years ago:
1. The media drives the machine. Fear and the spectacular sell newsprint and air-time, therefore events engendering fear and violence are exaggerated in the media.
2. A misinformed populace then elect politicians based on their misinformation and fear.
3. Politicians know the policies don’t work, but they cannot speak the truth and at the same time avoid being eliminated from public office at the ballot box.
4. Legislators, in pursuit of positive press, pass ever more restrictive laws and policies to be carried out by the departments of corrections.
5. Professionals in corrections know the policies are flawed, but they are paid to carry out, not shape, policy.

This, then, is our environment of opportunity! The good news is that many criminal justice professionals know that the mandate given them by society does not work, and brave souls among that group are doing their best to demonstrate change within the system. Only the brave lead the way actively as change agents in the corrections environment because prevailing peer pressure still reflects an overwhelming public mandate to warehouse prisoners.

The good news today is that state budgets are ravaged, requiring tough on crime policies to be revisited. Truth is dawning that years of being tough on crime has an untenable price-tag. Taxpayers are demanding states be “smart on crime” rather than tough. The economic issue may force the right thing to be done.