Baby (very baby) steps.

[elwen]

After my mini-rant about prisons on Saturday, James sent me this article about a program in Texas where they're teaching entrepreneurial skills to inmates.

It's . . . better than nothing, I suppose. It reminds me about articles about all the great rehab programs they have at San Quentin. And you don't need to have been a higher-up in organized crime to be seen as having "potential" for those.

What ends up being really depressing about these kinds of programs is the ridiculously low penetration. 69 people a year is not a lot when you think about how many prisoners there must be to generate 1,100 applicants. At San Quentin, there were about 200 people in programs, for a population of 5000. What made that second set of numbers more painful was that the inmates we talked to felt that there wasn't really demand for more.

But, like I said, it's better than nothing.

Numbers aside, there were two quotes from the article that struck me.

"I didn't know any prisoners personally, but I thought 'just lock 'em up and throw away the key'," she says.

"I saw them as a waste of tax dollars. I was very brutal in my approach."

But Catherine then recognised that many were ordinary human beings who had made some serious mistakes in their lives.

Yes! Exactly!

It kind of echoes the change of heart I had last year. Except I didn't quite think "just lock 'em up and throw away the key" -- it's more than I didn't think about prisoners at all. Then when I finally did, I realized that we were in a losing game for all of us. And it can be really losing for some, like the women whose chances of having a family are destroyed, and the nonviolent offenders who come out hardened criminals. For the rest of us, it might just be a drain on tax dollars. Which unfortunately makes it harder to persuade the people who really need to be persuaded that something needs to change. But the first step is to realize that these aren't evil people, they aren't different from us. They just made some mistakes, like we all do, or faced some bad situations, like we all do.

The second quote:

He says many businesses would like to give felons a chance, but they are afraid of the risks involved with a 50 to 70% national reoffending rate.

I always want to scream, "No! You're getting it all wrong! It's because you won't give these people a job that the recidivism rate is so high!"

I know, that's not the whole story. There are some who are incorrigible. And it's hard to figure out who those ones are, maybe. But... I don't know. Something has to change. A system more attentive to individual difference, a society that's more forgiving, something.

Comments

[thierrys.livejournal.com]

As long as you're accepting prison articles... ^^

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7872104.stm -- this one is about prisons in Kansas and Norway taking a different approach to traditional prisons. I thought of it seeing your post the other day!

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing! I think taking care of rescued animals could be easier to introduce than some of the other kinds of programs. Though I have stuck in my head this CSI episode I watched recently, where this ex-juvie agreed to become an informant and started working at a dog shelter suspected of being involved in dog fighting, and he ended up killing the woman who trained the dogs to be killers because he felt so bad for the dogs and was frustrated that the cops hadn't made a move yet. ._.

[thierrys.livejournal.com]

ooh...i hope that wouldn't be a recurring problem. in this case it seems as though the situation is a bit different (barring the volunteer who let a prisoner escape, what a dumbass) ^_^

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when we visited San Quentin, they told this story about how the most violent escape attempt happened when some lawyer snuck in a gun and a wig for his client. The inmate put the gun on his head under the wig and managed to get it back to his cell. All told, I think something like 3 guards and several inmates were killed. I can't find anything about this online, but I sure would have liked to know what that lawyer was thinking. I mean, a gun! Into a prison? What are you expecting to happen? At least sneaking someone out on a truck is potentially a peaceful process.

[ling84.livejournal.com]

I think what a lot of people aren't aware of is just how thin the line is between coming out a "good" person and a felon. A lot of it has to do with psychological trauma as a child and how people cope with stress and difficulty. We on this side of the bars can't really pat ourselves on the back for having chosen good parents or to have been born into a middle or upper-class family, after all.

Much of how we deal with life's challenges productively involves coping methods we learn as children from the adults around us, or are based on genetics, and many prisoners suffer from an inability to restrain themselves, or have maladaptive coping strategies. It's not that they're unaware of the punishments for crimes, but that their own internal reward-risk mechanisms are skewed.