I have had a new idea (which in itself is refreshing, so many old ones emerging for another go at me most of the time): instead of a traditional book review format, I will try addressing the author of a book directly. My first trial balloon will begin today's post.
Dear Author #1: Jack Myette
Dear Mr. Myette,
Let me begin by thanking you for your 25 years of service in the Michigan prison system and for holding onto your values during that quarter of a century. There are easier ways to have a regular paycheck, but you did it the hard way.
For a while I found the going rough in your book, Prison: The Inside Story. The stories were so bleak! You don’t sugarcoat your experiences or those of the prison inmates, that’s for sure. I was eager to get to the Transforming Lives [as an Officer and Educator] part but didn’t want to skip ahead, so I set the book aside for a few days and then returned to finish it.
What I have been thinking about most since reading your book—the question that plague many of us—is why there isn’t more education in prisons, given the clear results shown in lowered rates of recidivism. Let me put the question another way: Why don’t statistics on education and recividism persuade more people that changing lives in prison is a good thing?
(Here are some overall statistics on prisons for my other readers, numbers that should give all Americans pause. The graphs are easy to read. Take a look, friends.)
Jack, you gave one part of the answer to my question in your book: “the old ‘They ain’t got nothin comin’” attitude that you found among some (many?) prison employees, but I know it is widespread among the general nonincarcerated population, as well. I had community college students who thought that whatever horrible thing happened to prisoners behind bars was in some way “deserved” and part of their punishment; that prisoners should have no rights; that they certainly should have no “privileges,” including education. Of the three aims of incarceration—deterrence, reformation, and retribution—far too many Americans focus solely on retribution. (Not as in a simple “eye for an eye” fashion, either. Is the idea of proportion too subtle to be grasped?)
So retribution (however disproportional) is one part of the answer, and saving taxpayer dollars seems a minor concern, as the people intent on causing maximum suffering to criminals don’t care if retribution costs more than reform. They probably don’t care about recidivism, either, since the former inmate who returns to a life of crime only proves to these folks that he was worthless all along. Those who change prisoners’ lives, on the other hand, are a challenge to stubbornly closed minds.
But I think there is another, less obvious reason for not addressing recividism in any meaningful way, and that has to do with money. It has to do with capitalism.
I grew up in a town that boasted a maximum security prison. Back in the postwar 1950s, that prison had its own farm and raised its own food. You note that the Traverse City State Hospital also had its own farm, and your solution to overcrowded prisons and also homelessness and mental illness is to “turn back the hands of time,” to make prisons and mental hospitals once again “self-sufficient,” with “strong educational and vocational programs….”
The problem I see with the solution you propose is that prisons are a huge market just begging to be captured—a captive market audience, if you will, that business loves tapping. It’s a little like your prison school principal who didn’t want student inmates graduating, because he “received kudos for the number of students in school,” and every student who graduated was one fewer student in school, so a successful student prisoner took away from his numbers!
How, how sad that music was taken away from your students! Not only did your graduation rate subsequently fall, but the whole calming and basically human aspect of music was lost to the classroom and the students.
Back to my point about numbers, however—. As more and more prison services are privatized, as whole prisons are privatized, why would the businesses making money from incarceration want to see fewer people in the system? A successful prison, a prison that was not a revolving door but that returned reformed criminals to society—that prison, while certainly cutting costs, would also be cutting away its own future profits.
As long as prison populations are seen by for-profit business as fertile ground for investment, and as long as government is willing to relinquish responsibility for those it imprisons and to pay private business to take on the job, I see limited motivation for prisons to reduce recidivism. So step #1 has to be reversing and eliminating privatization of prisons and prison services.
Step #2, then, would be tackling that extremely knotty problem of retribution-only points of view, both among prison employees and among the American public at large.
When my Contemporary Ethical Dilemmas class discussed capital punishment, a number of students voiced the opinion that they would want death for anyone who murdered someone they loved. They imagined themselves as parents of a murder victim. None of them, until prompted by a written assignment, ever imagined themselves as the parent of a murderer. And yet, every murdered had parents and was once a child.
There are a lot of shoes we are reluctant to walk a mile in, but you have come closer to doing that than most of us, so thank you for sharing your memories and insights.
News From the Near Neighborhood
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| Tiny asters are left of cattail. |
On Sunday I noticed the season’s first blooming asters (keystone pollinator flowers), tiny pale lavender flowers upstaged by yellow goldenrod (also a keystone pollinator flower), pink Joe Pye-weed, and the startling blue of chicory flowers in the morning sun. Clouds have been spectacular in recent mornings, too.
It's fresh corn and tomato season, back-to-school time, dark coming earlier and daylight coming later. Still, I am not eager to “fall back.” Too much remains to do, indoors and outdoors—more jam to make and get into jars, hummingbirds and bees and goldfinches to watch as they buzz and weave and swoop among the thistles, still grass to mow, dinners with friends on the porch to arrange, always books to read, fun to have with dogs, and on and on and on.
Looking Across the Miles
Retributive and preemptive punitive actions continue to be taken by the current administration in Washington, D.C., against Americans who have dared to voice disagreement with the president. Friday it was an FBI raid on John Bolton’s home that the Wall Street Journal (hardly a “pinko” news source) called part of a “vendetta campaign” and “revenge” on the part of the president. It is completely mystifying and outright heartbreaking to see the people who worried so vocally for years and years about “creeping socialism” seemingly unconcerned about galloping fascism, a term I do not throw around lightly. Are these complacent folks just looking the other way? Will they claim later that they were in Iceland and didn’t see it happening?
The latest executive order from the White House (as I type these lines on Monday), going against the Supreme Court majority that included conservative Anthony Scalia, calls for a one-year jail sentence for anyone burning an American flag. The president holds the flag sacred as a symbol at the same time that he desecrates and denies American history and values. What, one wonders, does the flag symbolize to him, if not our history and values, freedom and the rule of law? Poor flag! Poor stars and stripes, to be so used! But it is hardly the first time and will not be the last that a scoundrel has wrapped himself in his country's flag.
No, I cannot imagine burning the flag myself. I don’t even like to see those little ones on sticks in rows in the ground, because all too frequently they fall over or the wind blows them down, and the flag is never supposed to touch the ground. (If you’re going to display it, do it right.) Do not mistake me! I am not in favor of flag-burning! But I am even less in favor of a lawless executive persecuting those whose views differ from his own. ¿Claro?
Perspective
Early in the morning, before what can be called “first light” but when dark isn’t quite as deep as it was 30 minutes earlier, I think about the long sweep of history, about nights and days hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and how the coming morning, now almost here, is not so much as the blink of an eye in that vast time canvas. There have been upheavals—movements of land and sea, advancing and retreating glaciers, extinctions and evolutions—that have left their mark in the rocky bones of the earth, but my life will not be such, and neither will the lives of any single person alive today.
At this point, Pompeii comes to mind, and that feels like a lit candle, because it wasn’t the views of those doomed people on law or religion or ethics that survived them but only random mundane moments of their lives, frozen by a tsunami of ash. And so, here I am, in a moment of my life: coffee mug on a table surface next to me, dog in her typical resting croissant shape on my other side, book in my hands. We see the Pompeiians caught in one frozen moment but not in their preceding moments. We don’t hear their conversations or see the daylight or darkening sky they may have seen. Their thoughts, whatever they were thinking before time came to an end for them, were completely erased.
We don’t feel like Pompeiians, though, do we? We write our journals, publish our books, make our movies and podcasts, and hope we can somehow, in some small way, influence the direction of the future, though the unintentional and unthinking ways we daily contribute to that future are much more likely to be effective. But whatever course the future takes, we will all one day be gone.
Do you find that long view depressing? Does it seem to illustrate meaninglessness?
I don’t see it that way. I find the long perspective calming. For me, it makes the present brighter and clearer and more precious—lamplight a pool of miraculous presence against the dark masses of trees outside the window, my dog’s warm, aromatic presence the gift of now, this moment in which we are both alive. The memory of another moment, from only the evening before, comes to mind: a viceroy butterfly motionless on a blackberry vine. And for that moment and this, for the miracle of life, my heart swells in gratitude.
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