Humane Punishment... is it possible?

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After reading and posting in the death penalty post, I wanted to bring up the subject of prisons and jails.

First off...
How may folks have first-hand experience of what it is like to either work in such a facility (in contact with inmates), or from having been an inmate?

I have been to jail while facing the real possibility of prison, back in my young adult days.
I have family who have been in prison for various things such as murder (nephew-in-law, and a step-brother), drugs, forgery, and rape.
All of these family members are part of my adopted family (my daughter is my only known living blood relative).

I have personally dealt with prisoners and ex-cons before in my life professionally or in a casual setting.


Next...
How many of you truly believe you understand what life is like behind bars? What do you base this belief on?


Taking all that into consideration, is there any way to describe incarceration as humane?
Even when comparing it to the death penalty?

Think deeply about what we do when we put someone behind bars.
It's not just someone sitting around stamping license plates or lifting weights or buggering another inmate in the showers.
Before you talk endlessly about how humane prison is compared to something like the death penalty, try to understand as best you can how it might feel to be inside...

You have very little choice in almost any aspect of your life. Sometimes your choices are rebuffed by the prison staff or physically overridden by other inmates.
You own nothing. Anything you think you own may disappear at any moment due to prison staff or other inmates.
When you sleep, when you wake up, when you shower, go to the bathroom, eat, read, exercise, communicate with other human beings, etc., are all directed by other people.
You do not choose the clothing you wear.
You may not be allowed to grow facial or head hair how you wish.
Your mail and anything brought to you from the outside is subject to search, censorship, and confiscation. And that is all just before it reaches your cell.
You have NO FRIENDS inside, you have NO ONE YOU CAN TRUST! If you're smart, that is.
You form alliances based upon need... the need for certain commodities, the need for drugs, the need to lessen the amount of physical torture you may incur from other individuals or groups, the desire to stay alive.
You have little choice in where your incarceration will take place... affecting ties to family and community.

Prison guards as well as inmates have at times described conditions in prisons as living with a bunch of animals.
If you have the answer to how prisoners can live with each other and respect each other... you would be a hero to so many!
There is no way to keep the injustices that occur in prisons and jails from happening unless we lock up every single prisoner in their own individual cell and never let them out with each other.
And that's just talking about the interaction between prisoners themselves.
Injustices occur between guards and inmates also. How do we solve that one?

Life is not all easy for the guards either.
Although it may be hard for some folks on the outside to believe, there are GOOD prison guards.
There are those who do not abuse their power... but they do find it quite stressful, none-the-less!

As a prison guard, you will be threatened and FEEL threatened in certain areas with certain types inmates. But you cannot assume that you are safe if you are a guard at Juvie hall or at at some minimum security facility. Violence can erupt anywhere.

As a prison guard, you will most likely be spit on, have urine and other body fluids tossed on you.

If any of you think time in prison will change a person... YOU'RE RIGHT!... but not always for the better.
No matter which side of the bars you are on.

An inmate is released for various reasons:
-having fulfilled their sentence as laid out by the court/state.
-Parole
-Pardon

When a con becomes an ex-con, they are either just let go, or they are released to the control of the state... still.

If you are of the latter group, your life is now under the scrutiny of a PO, or parole officer (probation officer for those who did not wind up spending time in prison).
This individual has the power to dictate where you can live, who you can associate with, if/when you will be going back to prison.
This individual can enter you home and search it, contact your employer (if you are so lucky as to be able to get a job), check into your daily activities as best they can.
They are burdened by an immense amount of paperwork coupled with demands of court appearances, keeping track of their parolees, and other regular job stuff as well as their family life. If they have a family, the PO keeps in mind that they have to keep their private life well hidden from the parolees because some of the parolees are still quite dangerous.
Sometimes the relationship between these two individuals can work well, most times it seems there is a heady amount of tension on a constant basis.

Back to the, now, ex-con.

So, you're back on the street. Perhaps you really want to stay on the 'straight-and-narrow'. Well, where do you go?
Back to the place you know best? Back to where you family is?
Often these are the places where the ex-con gets into trouble because there are many things about these areas that created the issues which led to the incarceration in the first place.

Will you get your old job back (hopefully it is a decent job.. not something pertaining to illegal activity... again)?
In my case, I was very fortunate.
I got my old job back.
I was accepted back into the community.
I volunteered with the local ambulance service.

All this aceptance!

The only thing I had to do was to give up a certain amount of personal responsibility and shift that onto someone else.
What I'm talking about is the fact that what I got in trouble for was done with another person.
This other person is family. The people in the town did not like this family member and they liked to assume that I was just an innocent lad led astray.
I knew full well what I was doing when we were committing our particular crime.
Yet, to be accepted back into the community, I basically had to turn my back on a family member
It helped that part of our 'conditions' were that we would live apart - so as not to get together and commit any more evil!
I stayed and he moved.
I did not have to face him with the knowledge that I let other people talk bad about him, yet accept me back.

When a person is an ex-con (I actually do not fall under that label), there are loads of psychological issues to deal with being back on the outside.
Recidivism does not occur in a vacuum. It is not just because an individual is a 'bad' person and like to commit crimes.
It is a hard life for an ex-con and those of you who have never experienced even a fraction of that sort of thing, have no idea what it is like.
You walk around feeling like you have a brand on your face, a mark so visible and permanent that you will never be free from it and all that is associated with it.

You may have been innocent but couldn't prove it, guilty of something so 'terrible' as having a some pot, but you carry the same brand as any other ex-con when it comes to looking for a job, looking for a place to live, looking for acceptance from any community you wish to live in.
You always know that if someone finds out you were in prison, or even jail to some people, they are likely to view you with a much more critical eye than any stranger on the street.

I believe that we should 'pay' for our crimes. I do not believe that everything we have listed as crimes in our society are, indeed, crimes.

I believe in the concept of rehabilitation. I do not believe prison is always the best place to do that.

I believe in taking personal responsibility. I believe in respecting those who do.

You dont appear to mention the other purpose of a custodial sentence: To remove from a felon the ability to continue in crime, to prevent him from having an adverse affect on society, to secure him against further crimes and keep him away from other potential victims of that crime.

Humane treatment in prisons is desirable, but it is worth noting that it is supposed to be a punishment, and no punishment can be completely humane. The very fact that prison is a singularly unpleasant experience is supposed to help prevent crime, by providing a deterrent. It rather defeats the point if it becomes akin to a holiday camp.

As for the mistreatment of those who are actually innocent.. that is a flaw of the justice system, not the penal system. Theoretically by the time an inmate reaches the penal stage, they should have been proven guilty. (Stress on the should.. I'm fully aware it often falls down.)

My resume may not be impressive on this issue but I did work in the public defender's office and along with my supervisor had to talk to defendents in jail. I also took classes concerning critical criminology ( a lot of researchers in this field are former convicts themselves) and corrections. Sure I don't claim to get what they were going through but I have had known acquaintances who told me their stories about what it is like and like anything in life you get use to it. One of the most deterimental aspects of incarceration I think is that it makes pple so dependent on a system that they can't function well on the "outside" because of it. Kind of like forcing ppe to become agoraphobics.



I don't base my thoughts about this issue on beliefs. I do however acknowledge and encourage more former convicts to tell their stories and to test and create their own theories as to the phenomenon of deviance and the purpose of the CJ system in general. Like feminist critiques on the justice system I find it really informative to hear the input of voices who have been previously ignored.



Compared to what? I would rather spend a couple of years in prison then get my hands and feet chopped off. Incarceratin tries to be as humane as possible but the public feels prisons should be used as a tool of punishment which is unfortunate considering that wasn't even their intended purpose. In the US like the schools, the prisons are not all equal in how they perform their function. Some prisons are nicer than others in that they actually try to address the inmate's needs and issues, others of course are corrupt or too badly funded.



That is a good point. There was a phrase attached to the astronomical amount of "lifers" that are filling up the prisons. Something like "Walking corpses". Life starts to lose a lot of value when you have absolutely no control in your own and I agree with you on that. However Iam one of those people who wants to avoid my death as long as possible.



They are already doing that. Super max prisons are the new innovation in prison design. Unfortunate side effect learned about in the 1800s but being steadfastly ignored is that this method drives most people insane. If anything it is a stronger form of injustice. I watched this documentary in one of my classes that brought tears to my eyes. In a female prison the inmates were given the chance to train seeing eye dogs. It really drives home the isolation aspect of prisons when there were women in the film who havent petted a dog in over 20 years.



From what I know on the topic POs have the same problems that social workers do. There just isnt enough of them to go around so their interaction with their clients is erractic at best and unproductive at worst.




Why don't you fit under this label? Were you only charged with an offense but never convicted?



That sounds kind of sanctimonious to me. I have never experienced a lot of issues that other people have dealt with but that doesn't mean I am incapable of seeing another side of the issue. From what I gather most people whom are callous about the prison system are just acting out their frustrations on those they feel have made their life harder for them. It's hard to be emphatic towards inmates when you have been victimized of a crime yourself especially a heinous one.



In this day and age it has become a form of insanity. I know of teenagers being branded as sex offenders because they had sex with someone who was a year or two younger then them. I have been fired from a job because I forgot to put on my application that I received an under age drinking fine a month after my 18th birthday. So housing and job discrimination based on minor transgressions is completely absurd and hypocritical. I always found it ironic that the jobs that pay the less care the most about whether or not you have been perfect in the past but the jobs that pay the most could care less.

You are correct on several points Macbeth, thank you.

My post was started as a reply of sorts to the death penalty thread floating around here.
The original poster for that thread went on about how much more humane it was incarcerating a person rather than taking their life through execution.

I know I didn't state this explicitly here, so I perhaps erred on that account.

Truth be told, prison is less a deterrent for many individuals committing their first crimes than it is an incentive towards not getting caught in the first place.

Yes, prisons are there for several reasons...
remove the offender from society-at-large,
prevent this person from committing other illegal acts out in society-at-large,
and hopefully to rehabilitate this individual.

For the first two, prisons work very well at keeping the actual person from partaking directly in criminal activity outside the institution.
The last one seems like a lost ideal.
While many an ex-con can tell you they never want to return to prison, this by itself does not constitute rehabilitation.
The recidivism rate is far higher than what it should be (at least in the U.S.), illustrating how ineffective our 'Departments of Correction' are... at... correction.

Part of the problem is the integration of non-violent or non-consistently violent offenders with true sociopaths.
The environment inside prisons has little to do with punishment as a means of correcting wrongs done to society, which I always thought was the goal of sending people to prison.
The goal while in prison is to stay alive and keep your sanity.
There are programs which try to create a change-of-heart with the inmates and sometimes these are successful.
For a number of inmates, they have resigned themselves to being the lower-class criminal.
Life outside the walls will be about 'not getting caught', more than not committing crimes.
It is what they are, it is what they know and it is a hard and vicious cycle to break out of.

What is the purpose of just taking years of freedom from someone for a crime they have committed?
You should understand that what criminals... either first-timers or career types... get out of prison, by-and-large, is not an experience so unpleasant that they refrain from committing the types of crimes that will put them back (or get them there in the first place), it's an experience so unpleasant that they come out of it more likely to 'not fit' into society and therefore fall into a life of crime all over again.
They are not welcomed back into society as changed men and women. They are marked beasts who we all must be wary of.
They know this and the only place for many of them to live life with some semblance of happiness, is back in the 'hood. Back with the only people they feel will accept them with all their faults.
We are NOT correcting the mistakes made... we are causing or abetting psychological impairment to individuals who might be better 'turned around' but NOT putting them in prisons.

Believe me, I am not interested in being all wishy-washy about someone who is dangerous to others.
I don't believe everyone should have a second chance after they kill, rape, torture others.
But I do believe this 'one-size fits all' penal system in Western society is a dismal failure.
We imprison people in institutions so terrible that they are adversely affected by the experience rather than reformed by it.

I do not advocate facilities that amount to nothing more than "holiday camps", as you put it.
I think there are other ways to admonish and correct behaviour not wanted in our societies.

Is it humane for an innocent person to be brutally murdered and/or raped?

Sentences aren't meant to be humane. They're meant to be punishments. Sure, they must be fair and not cause undue suffering, such as in prison abuse by other prisoners and guards, but their main purpose is to protect society. I think that the justice system needs reforming in such a way that different types of criminals are sent to different prisons according to their crimes, mental state, and intelligence, and perhaps put to work on tasks according to their abilities whilst they serve their sentences.

I wasn't looking for 'impressive', sorry if I cam across that way. Your background certainly has a bit of authority to it, don't you think?

As I state in my reply to Macbeth (made at the same time you were posting yours I guess), my thread here is spun off directly from another thread on capital punishment.


Sorry, but I'm going to keep some details private for now. I actually made the comment above because of this lingering 'fear' that when I mention I own firearms, some folks might wonder if I'm doing something wrong. My rights were all restored... I've got my letters to prove it you might say I'm one of the lucky ones.


Sorry, I have to agree with you on that. I should have not worded it that way. I certainly do not appreciate it when people do that to me.
Your last sentence though... for some reason, I feel sorry for people even when they do bad things. The guy who killed my sister... I really want to be able to believe he can turn around and be a better person; I just can't quite trust him though.
I honestly try to appreciate people's backgrounds in relation to what they do in life. Isn't that what folks here would want for themselves as far as being AS or ADD/HD? I'm not excusing certain actions, but I do see that there are reasons why some folks do the things they do and they are not inherently bad people.



The One-Size-Fits-All mentality... Three-Strikes laws...

Hmmm, I'm not sure how to read your opening question?
Especially since my post above your... down at the bottom... is a line where I mention not giving murderers, rapists, and torturers a second chance.

As Othila points out, in the early days, reform was the issue... not punishment without any other goal than puishment.
There were other ways to punish people without locking them up.

So, do you see punishment as only retribution, or as some sort of therapy, or as some sort of deterrent?

If all we need in society is retribution, we can dish it out in much harsher, cheaper, quicker ways than going through all the trouble and expense of having prisons.
Fighting crime (protecting society) by having prisons seems sorta like fighting with a conventional army against guerrilla fighters.
Sure, we can lock up loads of criminals... but there always seems to be plenty outside the prisons.
We can't lock them all up and the ones we do lock up represent a small fraction of the people out here causing pain and death.

Seems to me we could come up with something more effective.

Retribution and punishment against criminals, justice for the victims. However, criminals should be treated humanely and not be abused in prisons, no matter how much they might be hated. That or death if their crimes were so brutal and horrific that it is the only suitable punishment. Rape, brutal murder, and so on.
Criminals shouldn't be allowed to sue for any injuries incurred whilst committing a crime, either. Killing in self defence should be legal, but investigated to make sure that it really was justified and proportionate self defence.
Tough and proportionate, yet humane punishments.

There are probably plenty of crimes where a custodial sentence is counter-productive, and bears little relation to the crime at hand. Tax evasion is a purely financial crime, so surely it would be more sensible for the punishment to be of a financial nature. (Not just fines, but attatchment of all future earnings, that sort of thing.)

Unfortunately, criminals on lesser non-custodial sentences seem to perceive it as a close escape, and continue with their activities. People on tags can still commit crimes, they simply do them in a more cunning manner.

wsmac-
I just finished reading Phillip Zimbardo's book "The Lucifer Effect" which has even more on the SPE (Stanford Prison Experiment) which I'd read a lot about already. Sounds as if you might be familiar with that sort of info. ? Haven't an answer to question posed in title of thread, but do have intense reactions to the whole range of issues raised (incarceration, politicians' fear of appearing 'soft on crime', mandatory minimums, three strikes and you're out, the injustice system, and so on). It's just too emotionally overwhelming & painful for me to even try to write about at length & in depth, but wanted to at least post in order to express that I do think about such things.

Also recommend (though realize that 'preaching to the converted' doesn't change minds):
"Living Justice" by Jessica Blank & Erik Jenson, by authors who created the play (of which I saw a film version) "The Exonerated" (Innocence Project stories)
-and "Crazy" by Pete Earley, about his son's being jailed instead of being treated for his mental illness (in this case, bipolar-but there are people w/ASD's in same situation).

Belfast,
Thanks for the book recommendations.

Perhaps you should write about your feelings over this issue, but not online just yet?
I find that I do feel better writing about issues I feel very emotional about.
I guess it's just nice to have it outside my mind rather than always sitting inside.

I have read books and writings from folks both on the outside of prisons and the inside, and I find these quite interesting and educational.

I appreciate the comments from other folks too. It's nice to see the differing viewpoints here.

The only humane response to life is
to eradicate it, wherever possible.

Someone remind me never to go over to Calandale's place for dinner!

Being forced in a cage for your remaining days on Earth is a crappy way to spend your time which is probably why so many convicts find God. Considering their present lifetime's goals and aspirations are pretty much null and void, I probably would become incredibly spiritual also. However death is not something one can escape from. If your alive there is always the hope that your sentence may be overturned. Also as long as one is alive one can find a way to make their life meaningful to them. So mandatory long term sentences (which I don't agree with for numerous reasons) are a better alternative than death. I figure if a person really wants to end their life in prison they will find a way to do it; why get the government involved?



Ok. I kind of know legally now what happened to you I think. I didn't mean to pry.



I use to be that way until I met someone who turned my heart into stone. I never thought I would want someone dead until this person showed up in my life. I feel guilt for my feelings at times but at the same time I feel he took something away from me that can never be replaced. Granted I do not want a CJ system that reflects my subjective perceptions about someone but I brought up my last sentence as a point to why it is so difficult for a lot of people to want to support a system that helps insteads of hurts people. Over 80% of offenders were victims themselves of criminal acts; it clearly is a societal issue but one that nobody wants to acknowledge because there is no economic or political incentive to do so.



No disagreements here, I do the same thing. People may have good rational reasons why they commit criminal acts, however they commit those acts at the expense of everyone else. I am no follower of Bentham but I see the logic behind utilitarianism when considering the philsophical ramifications of punishing people for the illegal acts they commit.

How do you define "undue suffering"? It seems to me that by creating general principles you can have an operational definition of what is not undue suffering and thus put these principles under the umbrella term of humane sentencing towards persons incarcerated by the law.




We kind of already do that. Both federal and state prisons have different types of prisons depending on the inmate's crime and behavior. On the mental state issue I agree with you that it was a mistake to get rid of most of the mental health facilities in the 70s. Now thanks in part to that mistake all different types of CJ professionals must be trained in how to deal with mentally imbalanced persons. Drugs are a miraculous invention but only 33% of schizophrenics who actually take their meds are relieved of their symtoms. As for the intelligence thing, I don't know what you are getting at there. Violent criminals are not necessarily stupider than their non-violent counterparts considering that the majority of serial killers have average to above average IQs. Working in prison is quite common. Most wardens encourage and try to implement this practice. It makes sense considering the inmates are going to be there for awhile. The only issue I have with it is it is kind of like slavery. It weirds me out that the government conveniently has these super long sentences which lead to inmates having inordinate amounts of time on their hands. Are you for inmates receiving financial aid to take college course while incarcerated?

Criminals can't sue for any injuries they recieve while commtting a crime. If anything while committing a crime, a person gets caught in a web of creating more crimes just to get away with the crime they committed. If you are a robbing a bank and accidently shoot someone because your gun went off, you will still be charged with murder along with robbery regardless if homicide wasn't your intent that day. Police brutality is a seperate issue and is based in part on whether or not an officer used reasonable force to apprehend a suspect. Killing in self-defense is legal but the catch is that you must be literally in fear of losing your life the moment you take someone elses. This is tricky and controversial espeically when you consider domestic abuse cases. If most battered wives tried to kill their husbands during a violent struggle they probably wouldn't succeed, yet arn't they still in fear of their lives everyday? Investigations such as these are not easy to deterimine who was the victim and who the offender.