Why Do We Call Prisons Departments Of Corrections When They Do The Complete Opposite?
By Gary Robinson
Rehabilitation comes from Medieval Latin rehabilitare meaning, “to restore ones reputation or character in the eyes of other”.
Prison is no longer designed to rehabilitate. It is the big business of warehousing people as cattle. Imagine a 21 year old sentenced to 50 years in prison and must serve 47 years and 9 months before he is released. There is no good time he can earn for early release. There is no state pay he can receive for his labor, unless he is working in P.I. (Prison Industries) there he makes 35 cents to $1.00 an hour. The Pell Grant has been rescinded from inmates so they can no longer get a college education. Hope has been obliterated by the incessant dehumanization and degradation of his humanity. And as this young man wakes up every morning in an 11 x 7 cell with two other prisoners he wonders whether or not they will be locked in all day eating bag lunches or will he make it through the day without assault.
And all the while he holds a brave face for his family when they come to visit, if they come to visit, so that they don’t have to worry.
How do I know this? I was behind the barbed wire and prison doors. My name replaced by a six digit number that held my identity. As if the sum total of my being was housed in this numeric sequence.
It is the spirit of hopelessness and despair that now fill many prisons. Young men who have made mistakes that they will inevitably regret for the rest of their lives fight these spirits with outdated and under developed weapons.
And every now and then a trickle of information regarding the war men and women are fighting every day in these prisons reaches the ears of the civilians on the outside:
“An inmate was killed in a prison fight.”
“A female prisoner incarcerated for five years gave birth to baby.”
“Prisoners are locked in their cells and bathing from toilet water.”
These are the stories you hear but what about the ones that never reach the media. Like the young man who was placed on psychotic medication because prison authorities deemed him too much trouble. Now he no longer speaks coherently.
Or how about Stephan, a non -violent inmate, that was placed in a cell with a known rapist? Now everyday this young man wants to take his life, and when he goes home in two years who will he be able to talk too that won’t judge him?
Men and women in prison have to be sufficiently armed to do battle with the spirit of hopelessness and despair. And yet, you can arm a soldier with all of the latest weaponry but if he lacks the faith to defeat the enemy he has already lost.
Correctional Facilities don’t correct. Instead they have become breeding grounds for gladiators who still harbor the emotional and psychological pains that produced the criminal mentality that lead them to prison. They have no hope of ever coming home, so they have no desire to be better.
We all have to fight to change the nature of the prison system so that it rehabilitates and makes whole the damaged people that enter its gates. If not you may one day regret that you allowed a damaged and corrupt system to shape the minds and hearts of the people you find yourself living, working and eating amongst.
Most people never care about injustice until it hits home.
Don’t be one of those people.
