Prison Visit

On Monday and again today I will be taking members of the cast and artistic team to visit Avery/Mitchell Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine. I have taught for about six years at Foothills and Western Youth in Morganton, so I am fairly well acquainted with the prison environment. My Drama Department colleagues Rob Bowen and Laura Facciponti have also done some prison teaching. However, I must admit that when we were taken into a segregation cell, I found myself feeling very uncomfortable -- especially when the cell door started to close (I think the officers were playing a little joke). The students on Monday's trip had many different reactions, which I hope they'll share. I found the visit very sad. So many young lives ruined, many of them for "crimes" like drug possession. While the United States has only 5% of the world's population, we have nearly 25% of the world's incarcerated population. Prisons have become a multi-billion dollar business in America -- we have built an average of 50 new prison each year for the past twenty years. Dubious laws such as "three strikes an your out" and the sentencing guidelines laws, as well as the closing of so many mental health facilities since the 1980s has led to an explosion in the prison population. At around $35,000 per year to house inmates, and much more in maximum prisons where the cost approaches $60,000 a year, we warehouse people from 16 to 85. Surely this money would be better spent on education, substance abuse rehab programs, and social services. Of course there are people who need to be removed from society -- we could never eliminate prisons entirely. But our use of prisons as a substitute for rational social policies and community involvement is a blot on our nation's soul.
As Fyodor Dostoevsky said, "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals." And, I might add, how it treats those who spend their lives guarding those criminals. In Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons, Alan Elsner quotes a prison guard as saying there are three things you get when you take a job as a correctional officer: a truck, a gun, and a divorce. Increased suicide rates, substance abuse, and domestic violence is the result of spending eight to twelve hours a day in the stressful conditions of our prisons. Anybody who is acquainted with Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, recently written about in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, will recognize how the prison environment can turn normal people into abusers very, very quickly.
Perhaps it is time for us to consider whether our current approach to law and order is working, and whether there might be better ways to keep our society safe without destroying the lives of inmates, guards, their families, and their communities.