Editor,
I am writing in response to the news article “Inmate Population Drops,” in the Aug. 13-19 Daily Lobo. I have visited and corresponded with dozens of friends and acquaintances in many prisons during the past 25 years.
U.S. prisons are warehouses of notorious misery, intense loneliness and despair, hate and violent rage and wasted lives. Most prisoners starve to be touched tenderly and to be listened to deeply. Most are forbidden romantic intimacy. The prisons in Sweden and Holland however, allow a more normal life.
Multitudes of poor blacks, Latinos, Indians and Anglos suffer long years of slavery behind bars while filthy rich big shots in government and corporations commit much greater crimes and never get touched.
Prisons are a mushrooming profit business ripping off billions of tax dollars and making and breaking many prisoners more dangerous upon release. Prisons fatten contractors, bureaucrats and suppliers while brutalizing both prisoners and prison guards.
Our society craves a quick fix for street crime but refuses to deal with its roots and causes. Our society is hooked on punishment and revenge instead of forgiveness and healing.
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Supervised probation, alcohol and other drug treatment, healthy nutrition, fulfilling jobs, counseling, restitution to victims by offenders and many other options would work far better and cost far less for the vast majority of prisoners.
Years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court demanded that the state of Florida immediately set 1,000 prisoners free because their rights had been denied during their arrests, nullifying their sentences.
Panic gripped the public. The judge kept records of what those men did after they were released, and after two and a half years, only 136 of the 1,000 prisoners set free were arrested for crimes. Of another 1,000 prisoners, all of whom had served their full sentences, 254 were subsequently arrested for crimes.
Do prisons cure people? How does caging them make them better?
The renowned Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1893, “Every war, even the briefest, with the expenditure usual to war, the destruction of crops, the plundering, the licensed debauchery and murders, the sophisticated excuses as to its necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of military exploits, patriotism and devotion to the flag, the deigned solicitude for the wounded, and soon, does more to deprave people in a single year than the millions of robberies, arsons and murders committed in the hundreds of years by individual men under the influence of passion.”
Don Schrader,
UNM Nude Art Model
