Years ago I was in a production of Marsha Normans play, Getting Out. As part of our preparation, a number of the cast, myself included, visited a womens prison. We met several of the inmates and heard their stories. The thing they all had in common was that they started out in life in poverty, most from broken homes, and eventually made the one bad choice that landed them in their present circumstances. None of them blamed their poverty for their incarceration: the universal admission was, I screwed up. They were all longing for the day of their release and they were all determined not to return. All of them seemed to have plans for what they would do on the outside. Most of those plans involved reuniting with their family or creating a new one. Some of the plans were loftier than others; some wanted to go to college, some wanted to help women like themselves avoid their mistakes. Behind the words, though, I could sense the fear, the terror that it wouldnt happen, that their lives would be a struggle and now that they were marked it would be even harder. The unspoken plea was, Please, tell me its going to be okay. As I said, that was several years ago, back in the 80s, and prisons have gotten much worse since then. For-profit prisons create an incentive for states to keep the cells full. (In most places, if occupancy falls below a certain level, the states have to pay the prisons for the empty cells.) Also, the prisons have become the defacto warehouses for the mentally ill, where the inmates receive no treatment or help of any kind and the conditions are MAYBE slightly better than the hell holes of the 19th Century. In the South, particularly but not exclusively, the prisons provide cheap labor for corporations and since minorities are disproportionately represented in the prison population, it amounts to a new form of slavery. We can do better. We can do a hell of a lot better!
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:51:43 +0000