Why Prisons Suck
I’m a criminal justice major at Salem State University, and I didn’t know how fucked up the prison system was until I started to learn about it in my classes. Growing up, even until I came to SSU, I always thought that prison is just the place where we keep the bad guys. They are the scum of society, and should be treated as such, which is a bigoted and ignorant statement on my part. But that’s a different story for a different article. I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on prisons, but I do think that I can offer a somewhat valid statement on the topic.
Prisons, in an ideal world is a place where people who commit crimes go to, in order to be rehabilitated, and brought back into society. But that’s in an ideal world. This is not an ideal world. In reality, a prison is where we keep people who commit crimes and…. That’s pretty much it. It’s a place for people who commit crimes. While the goal is to rehabilitate them, and help them become productive members of society, that is rarely the case. Once people become inmates they adapt to the prison’s subculture, which is usually violent and hostile, a toughest of the fittest, welcome to the jungle kind of life style.
It’s almost stupid to expect people to come out of prison different and reformed individuals. Any logical person who has any sense of empathy inside them can identify that while these individuals have potentially done terrible things, they come from a survival of the fittest environment, and putting them in another survival of the fittest environment (prison) only reinforces that style of thinking.
Now that I’ve complained about prisons, here is one idea that I believe would help inmates actually become reformed. First, since the prison environment is inevitably going to be negative since you’re putting a bunch of violent individuals together, it is VERY important that the staff of these prisons care and nurture the inmates. The purpose of this is to provide a healthy environment where these inmates can have a place to grow, instead of defending themselves all the time.
An example of this is, let’s say that you go to pet an abused dog. The abused dog flinches when your hand gets closer, because the abused dog is only used to be abused, and has been conditioned to think that any action given is only going to hurt them. As bad as this sounds, a lot of prisoners are abused dogs, who are taught that violence and abuse are the only ways to live. The point of a positive staff is to unhinge that line of thinking, and promote positive behavior instead of negative behavior.
I love learning about criminal justice, but it’s a doubled edged sword. The more you learn about the criminal justice system, the more you learn how fucked up it is. The more you learn how fucked up our perceptions are of people who do commit morally wrong deeds. I don’t know if The United States will every have a perfect prison system. But I do think it can be improved to help the individuals incarcerated in them, opposed to just keeping them there.
