I know it isn't even on the radar of most people. I also know that we have so much on our plate we can't hope to do anything but focus our energy on the biggest and most important items. But I put this out there in the hope that prison reform will start to be on someone's radar. Maybe - hopefully - one day we'll have the energy to devote to a topic like this. It impacts more people than you think.
I'm sure we've all heard or read about a case where the crime is so extreme and the evidence is so clear that we relish the idea of this evil person going to prison where he or she will get exactly what they deserve. Maybe it was a pedophile (and we all know what happens to pedophiles in prison). Maybe it was somebody like Jeffery Dahmer. We know our prisons are brutal, violent places where just about anything can happen. And many of us secretly - or not so secretly - think he got just what he deserved.
The US imprisons a larger percentage of its own population than any other country; over 2,000,000 people are currently in prison. In numbers, that means for every Dahmer we have hundreds of thousands of your average run-of-the-mill criminals. Maybe not coincidentally, a large number of people are in prison for my other Don Quixote topic: drugs. Non-violent drug offenders make up a significant proportion of our prison population. For disclosure: I don't use drugs and I've never been in prison. No one that I know has been in prison. I have no personal axe to grind on this one.
Let me give you a scenario, one that happens too often. Let's say you go to a party with friends. While you're partying you all get a little too drunk for safety, but you drive anyway and wind up in an accident. A fatal accident, where - oh let's go for the drama - a pregnant mother of four is killed in her minivan. While she's on the way to bible school. In our tough-on-crime America, you're going to prison, and it's appropriate that you pay a penalty for the monumentally stupid thing you did. You killed someone.
You're not a celebrity, and you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay a high-priced legal team, and you're not going to a country club prison. Is rape a part of the price you should be forced to pay? Is being beaten close to death multiple times a price you should be forced to pay? Is living in fear for your life for the next 15 years a price you should pay?
We could argue about whether prison is appropriate for someone who committed an act of stupidity, as opposed to an act of willful malice, but the fact is our current justice system and society demand prison for just about everything. But what we allow to go on in our prison system is not justice; it's revenge. It's a holier-than-thou approach that fails to recognize any one of us could wind up in prison for an accident, and that we could wind up being subject to the environment we allow to flourish there.
When I first moved to California, then Governor Wilson was being hailed for tightening up the soft California prison system. He had stopped all training and reform programs, except for the basic religious ones. He removed computers and restricted what books and magazines were available to the prison population. So California started doing what most other states did; they release prisoners with a few dollars in their pocket, no more job skills than when they entered the prison system (but a lot more criminal skills) and tells them not to be criminals any more. Would you hire an ex-con? Would anyone you know? These people - if they're able to find a job - are going to work at menial jobs where they can't earn enough to live because our minimum wage is below the threshold of life. Based on the recidivism rate, most of them don't succeed and that doesn't surprise me. We set them up to fail, and when they do fail we subject them to three-strikes laws that just put them away for longer and longer periods of time. We don't give them the opportunity to learn anything other than the criminal behavior that sent them there in the first place, then we punish them for surviving the only way they know how.
At some point, this has to stop. At some point we have to understand that justice doesn't include revenge, and that imprisoning over 2,000,000 of our fellow citizens is not the answer.