“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
-Eugene Debs
Last fall I took a driving tour of West Virginia with my fiancee. It’s a beautiful state with a rich history. But as with all states, not all of that history is as beautiful as the mountains, rivers and valleys in which it has taken place. One of the sites we toured was the now closed state penitentiary in Moundsville. While I had taken the tour many years ago I think I saw it with different eyes this time. And I was really disturbed by what I saw.
Tiny cells made for two people. Even that level of occupancy would have been criminal. But for most of the prison’s history those cells were occupied by three. More than a thousand inmates had recorded non-natural deaths in the prison’s history. The tour guide let us know that unmarked graves were found numerous times and many more might still be undiscovered. A prison riot in the 1980s demanded better conditions in food preparation as there were rats everywhere. There was no heat or air conditioning. Desperate inmates would knock out windows in the summer just to get some air flowing. Showers were set up in public view right in front of all the cells.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was touring a concentration camp.
But this place wasn’t from Nazi history. This was still open as late as the mid 1990s. In my lifetime this place was open and housing prisoners in the name of the state I grew up in. The state whose motto seemed cruelly ironic up at the top of the massive structure.
The state motto is hard to see in the picture but it says “Montani Semper Liberi.” For those who didn’t take Latin, it means “Mountaineers Are Always Free.”
And all Americans live in the “land of the free.” Yet we incarcerate more people, per capita, then any other nation on Earth. This is true even though crime rates have been declining since 1990. More than two million Americans are in jail. Nearly a quarter haven’t been convicted of any crime at all!
All of this takes on even more importance now as we face a public health crisis. Jails and prisons are horribly unsanitary and it is impossible to practice basic hygiene. Forget social distancing. And while it is nice to see that some prominent voices are calling for inmates to be released or for others not to be detained, it is my hope that our focus on just how bad our prison system is will not be lost once the pandemic passes.
If we are to be the land of the free we have to face the fact that it is simply not okay to keep human beings in cages. That is true of the 39,000 in immigration detention centers that are also facing a huge risk as covid19 continues to spread. But those detention centers are inhumane all the time, not just now. The same is true of our jails and prisons. While some offenders are a risk to the general population, that does not give us the right to treat them as subhuman.
If you want to get a good overview of just how massive our incarceration system is in the United States, I would visit this site from the Prison Policy Initiative. That’s where I learned that roughly 550,000 are being held awaiting trial and they’re mostly poor and can’t afford bail. If you’re rich, you can be trusted to be released of course. And it’s where I learned one in five people are incarcerated for a drug offense. And then there was this chart detailing that 113 million Americans have an immediate family member that has been to jail at some point in their lives. This impacts everyone!
A crisis creates some problems but more importantly it exposes some of the major problems that have always been there. Mass incarceration in the United States is wrong on so many levels. It is racially and economically discriminatory. It is a huge financial burden. It sadly replaces mental health treatment in many states. But on the most fundamental level the way we operate prisons in the United States is fundamentally inhumane. The deep feeling I got walking through that empty prison is that no human being should ever have been locked up here.
We must incarcerate fewer people. When we do incarcerate people who are truly a danger to others we must do so under humane conditions with an eye toward treatment, rehabilitation and reintegration rather than punishment. Otherwise, how can we call ourselves the land of the free?
I started with a quote so I will end with one. Debs was a socialist and pretty antithetical to organized religion. But here’s a quote from someone many conservative Americans have a lot more admiration for, and he’s reading from the prophets:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”
-Luke 4:18