Witness. Share stories. Raise awareness. 

What a world, what a world. Everything everywhere all at once seems to be fragile, breaking or broken. Yup. But here we are and we have to preserve our sanity. Our resilience depends on clear thinking, a good night’s sleep, and socializing our concerns. It’s unlikely we can fix any of this in the near term. But we can stay alert and maintain the relationships that form our safety net. Most importantly, we can talk about it. Talking about the issues that worry us is a way to purge some of the stored tension in our bodies and strengthen our minds. Conversing with each other is the path to solidarity. If it feels like we are living in a war zone, we are. So we need to keep track of the threats. Be wary of false prophets, con artists and thieves. But we also need to smile at our friends, hug and laugh. One step at a time, onward. 

Here today I want to bring your attention to an issue that I’m thinking about. Take it in. Add it to your list of issues. Then let go of it and move on with your day. Mention it to someone else that might be interested. But don’t feel you must lurch into action because like many of the failures we are confronting, it is deeply systemic, woven into the culture of our nation. And yet, solutions begin with awareness. 

A year ago, I started writing a novel about a futuristic women’s prison called Esmeralda, and how the inmates there learn to rebel against the system that incarcerates them. It’s Shawshank Redemption with messy women and a bit of magical realism. So, I’ve been thinking about how prison works and why. Now the U.S. government has begun a campaign of mass incarceration on the pretense of public safety. Please ponder this with me. Incarceration needs to have a social justice component for it to be effective and make us safer. 

Stock prices of the two largest publicly traded companies that own and manage prisons and immigrant detention centers soared immediately following the election of this president. There is money to be made with for-profit prisons, but where does that money come from? You and me. Our tax dollars pay for the prison system. We own it. We will pay rent to those corporations for each inmate they house.

I know right now the collapse of so many systems we took for granted is overwhelming. To simplify the issue, I want to zero in on what is sustainable. That’s a word we don’t often apply to how the government operates. It’s easier to see the concept of sustainability in systems that depend on natural resources, like agriculture and our food supply, or oil and energy. But as we learned during the pandemic, people are also a natural resource. A few years ago, we ran out of nurses and doctors, and our supply is still short of what we need to sustain public health. Likewise, the prison system is supposed to rehabilitate people who have made mistakes and release them back into society as better citizens. But if our prison system increases the number of criminals, that’s not sustainable. 

If you’ve seen the photographs of the men in white boxers locked up in El Salvador, you know instinctively that situation is cruel and unlikely to rehabilitate. I’m not against incarceration. It can be a very effective tool. And I recognize that some criminals are beyond repair and must be permanently separated from society. But the majority of prisoners learn from their mistakes and redeem themselves if they are given the opportunity.

Here’s the contradiction we face. Redemption is the social goal of incarceration. The goal of a for-profit business is profits. Criminal justice is our civic duty. Corporations have no civic duty. A for-profit prison system is analogous to a for-profit healthcare system. Shareholders skim the social good off the top and keep it for themselves. The more prisoners we have, the more money a for-profit prison system makes. That’s a negative feedback loop. It does not make us safer.

We need people who are released from prison to become productive citizens again. That’s the cost-benefit of a well-run prison. Rehabilitation demands emotional intelligence, self-confidence, social skills, and intentional living. The punishment is to take away a person’s freedom and self-determination for a period of time while they learn to recover from their mistakes and do better. Prison is supposed to hold them separate from society until they are fit to return. The prison system is supposed to fix the problem, not make it worse. 

In my novel, Esmeralda Women’s Penitentiary is a for-profit prison. To keep costs down and profits up, the corporation isolates all inmates in their cells for the duration of their incarceration, even if it’s decades. There is no group assembly, no cafeteria, no exercise yard, no showers, no classrooms. Not like Orange is the New Black. More like Black Mirror. In Esmeralda, technology enables extreme isolation in an antiseptic environment with artificial intelligence doing continuous surveillance. The fun is in the ways women defeat the system. Still, it’s a cautionary tale about what hi-tech prisons can become.

The bottom line is cruelty does not make us safe. Cruelty begets cruelty. It’s an unsustainable approach to prison because it increases the volatility it is supposed to eliminate. When a prison concentrates too many people in a small space, the virality of criminal behavior increases. When prisons become a weapon for ethnic cleansing, they ignite violence inside and outside the walls. This is what’s happening on our watch.

The purpose of prison is to improve society. Monitoring criminal justice is our civic duty. Yes, it’s complicated. Pots are boiling over on all fronts. But we can talk about the issues we witness. Share stories. Raise awareness. That is the path to solidarity. Thanks for reading.