Recently, I received an order on Amazon for a book. This purchase was for an inmate in a correctional institution and the purchase address was to the inmate, with his prison number after his name (proper protocol and required for inmates to receive incoming mail). Having experienced problems with this type of order in the past-I had a package rejected for “excessive tape” (apparently packaging tape can be used to make or fortify a shiv/shank)-I called the correctional facility to see what I had to do to successfully complete this transaction. The prison guard I spoke with on the phone, who was almost flippantly (or comically) candid, told me not to send the book because it would get rejected by the facility. My father, who is a minister, had a similar experience trying to send a Bible to a suicidal congregation member in prison. This experience made me think how sad it is that I (a seller on Amazon and a complete stranger to the prisoner) cannot send a book about the biology of bats to an incarcerated person. Despite thorough searches of all items sent via mail into prisons, these shipments would still be denied by the facilities for whatever reason.
America’s correctional facilities have been on my mind a lot lately. Following Anders Breivik’s recent homicidal rampage in Norway, many news agencies began to report on the “cushy” conditions Breivik would likely experience in prison in facilities such as Halden Fengsel, and compared them to the punishment doled out in American correctional facilities. Many media outlets expressed outrage that Breivik could—but incidentally will not—be released twenty one years from his conviction. Norway takes great pains to humanize the incarceration experience, constructing correctional facilities that allow prisoners relative freedom of movement, contact with family on the outside, excellent amenities and facilities, accessibility to the outside via internet, stimulating work and recreational environments inside the facility walls, and personal privacy.
What are the results of this approach? Norway has a recidivism rate of approximately 20% two to three years from an inmate’s release, while the United States has a recidivism rate above 60%. Yes, Norway has a smaller population than the United States. Yes, Norway has a lower crime rate, more restrictive gun laws and fewer problems with gangs compared to the United States (only in the past 20 years has Norway had problems with biker gangs such as the Hells Angels and the Outlaws). However, this does not discredit Norway’s successfully low recidivism rate among its former inmates. So, why do developed countries such as the United States espouse a failing strategy of imprisonment and punishment?
The beginnings of an answer to this question and the inspiration for this piece are found on a TV show called Lockup Raw shown late night on MSNBC. Since I often find myself staying up late with insomnia, I generally end up watching this show when late night TV options run out. The program travels around the United States, filming the ins and outs of living as inmates and working as correctional officers in American correctional facilities across the country. One especially telling scene from the show had a correctional officer in Boston’s Suffolk County Jail saying goodbye to an inmate, then asking the inmate when he would see him next and laughing about it. The correctional officer then expressed his belief that the former inmate would either violate his parole or commit a crime and be re-incarcerated in the same facility. This scene subtly captures one of the biggest problems with correctional facilities in America: nothing is being corrected or rehabilitated, and no one (guard or inmate) believes in that mission statement.
While Norway attempts to humanize their prisons and mainstream/rehabilitate inmates for their future success back in society, the United States clings to punishment theory for its so-called “correctional” facilities. Inmates must submit to all commands of the correctional officer, no matter how arbitrary or capricious (as long as the command is legal and not violating an inmate’s human rights, and even then, who knows). Officers shown on Lockup Raw often make bad situations worse by heightening the tension between themselves and inmates with seemingly unnecessary directives.
Corrections officers create, maintain and sustain a system of restriction, privation and subjugation to further punish their inmates (beyond their mere incarceration). Austere cells and facilities further aggravate the psyches of inmates who frequently come from dysfunctional families, impoverished socioeconomic backgrounds and quite often are mentally ill to varying extents. Correctional facilities can even have water and electricity restrictions, forcing inmates to, for example, commingle toilet and sink bathroom water or restrict their reading. Correctional facilities are places of extreme danger for everyone involved, inmate and officer alike, due to the incarcerated persons, the restrictive punishment systems in place, and the continuous heightened state of alert in the facilities (due to both inmate AND officer behavior). Inmates are at no time treated as human equals by corrections officers, but are instead further confined inside correctional facilities in a parent/child relationship (I think back to the words my parents would say that made me the most angry as a kid: “because I said so”).
Nowhere is this situation clearer than the cell extraction. If an inmate refuses to comply with instruction while in his or her cell, or s/he is destroying their cell or creating a hazard to the prison while in their cell, this situation can lead to a cell extraction, where a team of trained correctional officers go into the cell, subdue the inmate, and extract the inmate. The process of cell extraction is highly formalized, with a clear coda of verbal instructions, precise videotaping of the incident for legal reasons, clothing and equipment to protect the officers during the cell extraction, and regimented teams following procedure to the letter during the extraction. What is incredibly striking and not discussed on Lockup Raw is the fact that this cell extraction is often a test of wills between officers and inmates. Perhaps half of the cell extractions displayed on Lockup Raw are truly due to such hazards as facility tampering, fecal/urine cell contamination, or violent/hostile behavior by the inmate. The other cell extractions involve inmates trying to “prove a point” or demonstrating an unwillingness to submit to officer commands.
Cell extractions are not only a power play between inmate and officer, but are also a gargantuan waste of resources, manpower, training, and equipment. Officers are frequently called in or off from other duties to participate in the cell extraction. Someone has to film the incident from beginning to end. The state or federal government has to pay for the equipment, clothing, and extensive training programs involved in training officers to properly extract inmates from their cells. Instead of humanizing the prison experience, American correctional facilities dehumanize inmates, leading to situations like these where inmates act out in a futile “test of wills” against officers. By infantilizing inmates, correctional facilities encourage the exact type of inmate behavior they are supposed to be correcting: reliance on criminality and gang networks to solve problems, desperate acts based in impulsivity, inmate fatalism toward his or her life and the future, and an intransigence/unwillingness to work within a set of agreed upon rules and laws. None of this is corrected in correctional facilities. Instead, American corrections systems create angry individuals that pick up additional criminal tricks and affiliations within its walls, and develop a depressed despondency towards life and society.
Detailed indictments of the American correctional system have filled numerous academic volumes. Lately though, I have been pondering some points regarding the correctional system I have not seen or heard discussed. I have spent the initial part of this discussion covering what correctional facilities do to inmates, but what do they do to the officers? In psychology experiment conducted in 1971, Philip Zimbardo, a student of Stanley Milgram, (see the Milgram Obedience Experiment) studied the effects a prison environment had on the mental state of guards and prisoners as a variable. In Zimbardo’s highly provocative and non-replicated study, (ethical concerns swiftly arose and the initial experiment itself was ended early) so-called “normal” people became “aggressive and abusive” in their roles as prison guards, while the inmates in the study became “passive and depressed.”
In such a highly demanding job, what psychological counseling and training is offered to corrections officers to help them cope with the stresses of their job, as well as stay ethical, fair and level-headed in their conduct? How could corrections officers NOT become aggressive in such an environment, structured by its very nature to expect and elicit dangerous actions and create tense surroundings? How could corrections officers humanize the correctional facility experience at all without a complete overhaul of the system? Why do we still call them “correctional facilities?” Who is to say that the correctional system does not also dehumanize the officer?
Despite these concerns, corrections officer is an attractive job to many. In a landscape of high unemployment and a tough job market, the job of corrections officer is still a burgeoning one. From 2008 to 2018, the corrections system has a predicted growth rate of 9%. As of 2009, there were over a half-million corrections officers, bailiffs, wardens, supervisors, managers, and jailors working in American correctional facilities. These statistics do not account for all the other jobs created by correctional facilities, such as maintenance, construction, food service and delivery, laundry, groundskeeping, surrounding businesses to accommodate visitors needing hotels, motels, and food, etc., many of which depend upon the amount of inmate labor used (or not used) by the facility.
These inmates and ex-inmates account for a surprisingly large portion of American society. As of 2009, 2.3 million people were either in jail or in prison. When including those individuals either on probation or parole, 2.3 million climbs to 7.2 million people. In 2009, U.S. population estimates put total population at 305 million. So, essentially 2.4% of the total American population had some sort of correctional supervision governing their lives. This does not account for all those individuals who successfully made it through correctional supervision, yet still have a felony on their record. In an era of fewer unskilled/low-skill/blue collar/middle class white collar jobs in America and slow to no-growth job sectors, it should be no surprise that the American correctional system is run more like a warehouse system than a system that corrects criminal behavior.
Putting Foucault’s conceptualization of the state creating “docility” in inmates in his Discipline & Punish aside, I must build upon Angela Davis’s mental construction of the Prison-Industrial Complex to get an accurate picture of the American correctional system. Building on the foundations of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s historic farewell address warning of the dangers of a Military-Industrial Complex, (newsflash America: we are already there and have been there for awhile) Davis posited that the American penal system had become a big business just like military manufacturing and production. This accounts for corrections officers, facilities, etc, but it does not account for the failure of the correctional facilities themselves. Perhaps the rate of recidivism in America can be overlooked by the state, because the state needs bodies to fill these “big business” facilities.
Less obvious though is the amount of labor the corrections system removes from the free labor pool. Instead of correcting and normalizing inmates to go back into society as productive citizens, the state prefers to relegate these former denizens of correctional facilities to recidivism, joblessness, underemployment or holding menial jobs. By dehumanizing the correctional facility experience, the inmates’ recidivism rates are considered an acceptable side effect to the incarceration of American citizens. In a country with fewer and fewer jobs, taking these individuals out of the labor pool creates space for other taxpaying “regular” citizens while not “wasting” resources on correcting criminal behavior. Convicted criminals’ expendability creates space in the labor market, much like capitalism’s need to produce spaces to expand and grow infinitely and forever (think legitimate spaces as well as bubbles: the housing boom, the dotcom boom, the derivatives market, or the swampland boom before the Great Depression).
The lack of correcting criminal behavior in correctional facilities creates these types of faux spaces. In this case, the deletion and delegitimization of theoretically productive workers from the American free labor market and their subsequent warehousing in the correctional system creates jobs to both supervise and aid in their warehousing AND creates labor space by taking these individuals out of the labor pool, sometimes indefinitely. Even if inmates beat the odds and do not repeat offend, their job prospects are often incredibly grim, particularly as a convicted felon in a hypercompetitive job market. This once again aids the weak American job market by creating one less viable job competitor.
While America can afford and might downright relish less viable job candidates, a country such as Norway, with 4.8 million people (as of 2009) cannot afford to warehouse thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of its citizens in correctional facilities. In a modern and robust Western economy, people are needed to run a functioning democratic society, particularly one as hi-tech oriented as Norway’s. Additionally, Norway cannot afford to warehouse thousands of its citizens monetarily. Therefore, Norway corrects the behavior of its wayward citizenry in its correctional facilities. Simply put, Norway cannot afford in any capacity to dehumanize and warehouse its citizens convicted of crimes, save for a select few like Anders Breivik. Meanwhile, the United States, reeling from a bad economy, credit crunches, and slow/no growth can afford to dehumanize their incarcerated population and allow 2.3% of the population to go “uncorrected,” including incarcerated persons wanting to read about the biology of bats.
**Disclaimer: I appreciate the hard work corrections officers have to do on a daily basis. I am finding extreme fault with the system itself.**
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John (J.D.) Roberts is a PhD student in the History Dept at UMass-Amherst. He focuses on drug trafficking history in Latin America, but has researched and written on a wide array of issues globally, particularly globalization and illegality.
Recently, I received an order on Amazon for a book. This purchase was for an inmate in a correctional institution and the purchase address was to the inmate, with his prison number after his name (proper protocol and required for inmates to receive incoming mail). Having experienced problems with this type of order in the past-I had a package rejected for “excessive tape” (apparently packaging tape can be used to make or fortify a shiv/shank)-I called the correctional facility to see what I had to do to successfully complete this transaction. The prison guard I spoke with on the phone, who was almost flippantly (or comically) candid, told me not to send the book because it would get rejected by the facility. My father, who is a minister, had a similar experience trying to send a Bible to a suicidal congregation member in prison. This experience made me think how sad it is that I (a seller on Amazon and a complete stranger to the prisoner) cannot send a book about the biology of bats to an incarcerated person. Despite thorough searches of all items sent via mail into prisons, these shipments would still be denied by the facilities for whatever reason.America’s correctional facilities have been on my mind a lot lately. Following Anders Breivik’s recent homicidal rampage in Norway, many news agencies began to report on the “cushy” conditions Breivik would likely experience in prison in facilities such as Halden Fengsel, and compared them to the punishment doled out in American correctional facilities.[1] Many media outlets expressed outrage that Breivik could—but incidentally will not—be released twenty one years from his conviction.[2] Norway takes great pains to humanize the incarceration experience, constructing correctional facilities that allow prisoners relative freedom of movement, contact with family on the outside, excellent amenities and facilities, accessibility to the outside via internet, stimulating work and recreational environments inside the facility walls, and personal privacy.What are the results of this approach? Norway has a recidivism rate of approximately 20% two to three years from an inmate’s release, while the United States has a recidivism rate above 60%.[3] Yes, Norway has a smaller population than the United States. Yes, Norway has a lower crime rate, more restrictive gun laws and fewer problems with gangs compared to the United States (only in the past 20 years has Norway had problems with biker gangs such as the Hells Angels and the Outlaws). However, this does not discredit Norway’s successfully low recidivism rate among its former inmates. So, why do developed countries such as the United States espouse a failing strategy of imprisonment and punishment?