Prison

Apart from an extensive DVD backlist, my firsthand experience of gaol is rather lacking. While Tom Fontana’s confronting prison series, Oz, is a remarkable eye-opener to the daily struggle for survival in such institutions, no dramatisation can accurately capture the experience. Studies inarguably demonstrate that prison, more often than not, increases the chance of inmates reoffending. Bunching the ‘bad apples’ of society together has proven much more effective than the public school system – turning petty thugs into criminal graduates of real promise.

Statistics are not my favourite reference, but they are the only practical means to imagine the sheer scale of the American prison system. The USA contains five percent of the global population, yet it has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. With a population over 300 million (frightening I know), that equates to one in every hundred Americans living behind bars.* Broken down by race, the figures are even more alarming: 10.4% of black men aged 25-29 are incarcerated compared to 1.3% of white men the same age.

How did things end up this way? Consider the economic benefits of reducing unemployment figures with all those inmates – not to mention the money to be made. Many prisons in the US (and Australia) are private businesses, run by managers and driven by profits. Take the efficient example of California, whose gaols have a capacity for 100,000 inmates, yet manage to hold over 170,000. Then there are the benefits of the restored slave trade; with prisons producing commodities from military uniforms to office furniture – all with exceptionally cheap labour costs.

Be sure to buy free-range prison furniture.

Prisons are a relatively new invention. Humanist thinkers during the Enlightenment argued that punishment was better aimed at reform, rather than retribution. From the late 18th Century, the encouragement of personal responsibility and individual redevelopment was far more beneficial to a burgeoning industrialised economy – in dire need of factory workers – than the capital punishment of medieval times. This new consciousness is best shown in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a prison built in 1785, where inmates never know whether they are under surveillance or not.

This rational, utilitarian approach to prisons has mutated into a counter-productive hindrance to society. Today in the US, social problems are dealt with by incarceration rather than community involvement – the ‘three strikes’ laws being the best example of this managerial efficiency. Consider the grocer who continually sold rotten vegetables in medieval English village. The community would have locked the grocer in the stocks where he was subjected to a few days of humiliation, often as his rotten produce was vigorously returned to him. Compare that to the fate of Santos Reyes, a petty thief from California, who is currently serving a life sentence for cheating on a driving test.

The out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude hardly solves the woes of society or hold perpetrators of crime responsible for their actions. Naturally, there are psychopathic and sociopathic members of society who reject rehabilitation and are blind to their own indifference, but putting petty criminals behind bars serves neither the state nor the individual. Community involvement, education and empowerment can, at the very least, turn a selfish bastard into a conscious bastard. All prison can do is turn a drug dealer into a drug dealer with a lot more contacts and expertise.

* Australia runs a respectable 6th in this race with 124.5 prisoners per 100,000 people.