Destroying a Person Twice: Injustice in America
The United States leads the world in a number of statistics. One, which is the product of a Twitteresque approach to discussing problems combined with really weird fear, is the amount of people that wind up in prisons. The highest in the world -- almost 25% of the total population of people held behind bars on the entire planet -- and unbelievable in a modern, supposedly evolved society.
To make the situation even more dire the US has figured out that this locking-people-up thing is also a great business opportunity so the US now leads the world in yet another unbelievably silly category, making money for investors post trial. And please do not demonize police on this one, who are being asked to be keepers of the peace, social workers, and mental health outreach specialists on an ever more depressed planet. They are heroes to me that head into a daily fog of violent uncertainty and, given the stress, screw-up just like anyone that is being pushed beyond their ability to get the job done would.
The issue here is the "system", and it has consequences for society far beyond the concrete boxes in which we stack our prison populations. The story coming out on the Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania is one of the more obvious signposts of this punish-at-all-costs movement with the metric being largely forgotten on what should be the outcome. It is, like US healthcare, a system without a map, no captain of the ship or judge and jury. Forget a scorecard on success or something as simple as accountability.
The Lewisburg prison as you will read on the link is unknowingly experimenting with a toxic mixture of stress, torture and little understanding of anything related to making sure people stop doing bad things. In some ways it would (NOTE: I am not serious of course) be more humane to simply execute everyone that steps into places like this given the amount of collateral and person damage the US system is causing. We -- all of us name calling from the US -- definitely do not hold the moral high ground when it comes to human justice, with criticism of people like Assad in Syria sounding stupidly silly when we do not provide protection for people living in our own country.
Enjoy or be depressed by the read, depending on how extreme your view is of making sure people suffer for something. I have seen all sides of this issue and would prefer to forget about how bad it is please.