After watching the movie The House I Live In, and participating in a play, Any One Of Us: Words from Prison, I learned that American prisons are often privately owned, corporate based and need prisoners to keep jobs for the guards. This information was supported by my cousin, who worked as a guard for years. Cops know that they must arrest people to feed the prisons to keep jobs for their buddies and their community.
Yes, both the movie and the play have the goal of getting us to understand that prisons are not simply institutions of punishment, but an extremely complex interchange of layers, networks, connections, reasons, influences… and are often less about punishment and more about catering to the fears of the public, fed by the media. Even then, both the movie and play argue points that are supported by other sources.
Obama just pardoned 8 people who were imprisoned for life during the media fueled outcry over crack in the early 1990s when the government decided that a sentence for 1g of crack would be equal to that of 100g of cocaine. Because of everyone’s panic, the government responded by passing this type of mandate. It wasn’t about the drug as much as it was about the rage-du-jour—what’s mega-evil one decade might not be as evil the next decade.
Today it’s meth and prescription drugs—being caught with 2 loose 5g pills of Oxy, which isn’t enough to get high off of, will get you a felony in Minnesota while a full ounce of weed will just be a 3rd degree misdemeanor.
A woman who hits her husband once with a baseball bat after 10 years of abuse will go to jail, period. The abuser will walk because “she didn’t report it to the police to begin with,” even if she has 100 people testifying that she was abused. If the cops don’t have direct documentation that he raped, slapped or punched her every week for 10 years (even though she risks her life involving the police), she will pay the price for finally snapping and defending herself. If she’s a person of color, lives in poverty or has a public defender, good luck getting anything less than the maximum. That’s exactly how it is.
And, don’t get me started on the religion-based private prisons that give ludicrous privileges for those who become outspoken converts.
Anyone with a felony over the age 18 has a life sentence. Society has no room for them. That alone encourages recidivism.
My point is—American prisons are not organized, fed, and run in any way, like Norwegian prisons. Until we change the way we feed our prisons, how we react to crime in our country and how we view and treat felons, we can’t change the way American prisons are run.