I never get used to crime stories in the papers. They’re always frightening and leave me with a haunting feeling of vulnerability, even though I was a police and court reporter for many years and saw my share of atrocities. What’s even worse, though, are stories about prisons in our state. Our penal system constitutes an official underworld of incredible violence and neglect. Our jails are not only inhumane but verge on the sadistic. Most inmates are not murderers, rapists, armed robbers or abusive thugs. Our jails have increasingly become the fate of those of us who face homelessness, working poverty, an array of social and class disadvantages, and mental illness. They are not places of rehabilitation and treatment, but of victimization, out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
As Lalita Moskowitz, litigation manager for the New Mexico ACLU, wrote recently in The Torch, “The dire conditions in our state’s prisons not only harm the human being suffering inside them and their families, but our broader communities as well.” A report from the Equal Justice Initiative accuses jails and prisons in our country of allowing prisoners to be “beaten, stabbed, raped, and killed in facilities run by corrupt officials who abuse their power with impunity.” Some prisons see to it that inmates are denied “medical care, help managing their disabilities, mental health and addiction treatment, and suicide prevention….”
Some 2.3 million people are living as vanished souls in American prisons, more per capita than any other country on earth. Close to 13,000 of them are behind bars in the Land of Enchantment, and some 6,000 of those are in one of the state’s miserable 33 county jails and sundry other local lock-ups. That makes New Mexico’s prison population larger than that of the cities of Los Alamos, Las Vegas, Taos, Raton, Los Ranchos or Tucumcari. The Prison Policy Initiative reports that in recent years close to 50,000 New Mexicans are booked yearly into local jails, many probably terrified and bewildered, even if most of them are released on bail.
Behind these statistics hides another brutal truth. New Mexico, like many other states, spends about three times more taxpayer dollars a year housing an inmate than it does in educating a child, according to Yahoo Finance. Is there a direct connection between impoverished schools and high rates of imprisonment? What would happen if prisons became model schools themselves, working to ensure that inmates had a chance to make a living upon release?
There are doubtless many schools of thought about prisons and prisoners. Some people really think that rehabilitation, vocational training and job placement after release are “coddling” prisoners. They hold that if you’re in jail you deserve whatever hell comes your way. Others think that such a view creates the necessary conditions for an increasingly lawless and violent society. Many believe that jails and prisons are schools of crime, doing vastly more harm than good.
The last thing that any law-abiding New Mexican in their right mind would want is to find themselves in one of our state’s hellish jails. And yet it’s perfectly within the realm of possibility. One beer, one glass of wine, one slight swerve over a double line could find any one of us driving through Los Lunas, let’s say, being pulled over, arrested and thrown into the black hole of the dreaded Valencia County jail for the night, or into what PrisonInfo characterizes as the worst prisons in the state, the Guadalupe County and Lea County lock-ups. Jails like that are violent, filthy, disgusting dungeons, virtually run by gangs and other bullies, hellholes where sexual abuse is as common as backed up toilets and revolting food. Such places have been known to lose the keys to cell blocks so inmates can’t even get to their arraignments or sentencing hearings. Some keep their emergency exists locked or are so unhygienic they’re virtual Petri dishes for infections.
Tragically, “paying your debt to society” often makes it impossible to thrive outside of prison, causing the recidivism rate in New Mexico to soar to as high as 60% after three years. Imagine how hard it would be to find a job with a felony record, a poor education, suffering emotionally from worsening mental illness and prison trauma, being financially on the ropes, and with no technical training.
In an ideal world, prisons could become schools of enlightened second chances, places where the injustices of bad luck at birth might be ameliorated if not righted. In WWI and WWII New Mexico’s recidivism rate dropped to 2%, owing to strong programs of vocational education, and guaranteed job placement after release. Even in war, our towns and cities were safer places than they are today.
A penal system like ours today is not only a horrendous danger that anyone one of us could face, it amounts to a shameful if open secret that poisons the ethical well of our culture, threatening the source of compassionate fellow feeling, and a sure sense of right and wrong. Prisons like ours should be outlawed under the Eighth Amendment as acts of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Such an important column. I do believe that there is a direct connection between impoverished schools and high rates of imprisonment, just as there is between the paucity of mental health care and other social lacks. As someone who has spent a brief couple of days in a horrendous prison and who has met some of the finest humans I know in conditions of long imprisonment, I can attest to the fact that our prison system punishes rather than rehabilitates. And endemic racism also plays a role. Proportionally many more people of color are imprisoned in this country than whites. Colombia University in New York City has an active center for prisoner rights that was founded by someone who spent 22 years on the inside. It is 75% staffed by ex prisoners. And it is part of a countrywide movement for change.
Absolutely. Thanks VB.