My Thoughts on Building More Jail Beds

My Thoughts on Building More Jail Beds

    Thousands of people are locked up in city jails, county jails, state and federal prisons. What do all of these people have in common besides being incarcerated? Nothing other than they were arrested and are awaiting prosecution or have been prosecuted. That is all. That is it. Other than that we know nothing about each individual person. How and why did they get arrested? What provoked or caused the so called crime? If we can’t even answer these most basic questions then we have no business arguing what these incarcerated individuals need or don’t need. We have no business judging these individuals’ personalities or characters or abilities. They are individual human beings with their own stories and their own challenges and their own gifts.

     When people go to a doctor for an illness or injury they want the doctor to help with a cure. A good health professional will ask you a long list of questions to narrow down the problem. Your problem COULD have been self-inflicted, such as drinking too much alcohol or eating too much sugar or saturated fats, or it COULD have been a cause totally out of your control, like lead poisoning or pollution in the water or air, or it COULD have been due to a genetic condition. The point is that you have to do a little problem solving in order figure things out. Once the source of the problem has been identified you may have three or four different options to address your healing. Shouldn’t we be more like this when addressing the treatment and prevention of crime?

    Unfortunately, our legal enforcement system does not work that way. We arrest people and put people in jail, (even pretrial). We put them away from their families and jobs. Our legal system forces these human beings to give up all personal possessions, (including socks and underwear), and forces them to even buy their own stripes. This is punishment and coercive control and gives zero account to the context or individual situations. People are forced into multiple classes each costing lots of money. This puts each person further into debt and creates more humiliation. Most people do not need these classes, but they certainly provide much needed revenue for the court and jail system and its vendors.

    The entire system puts the incarcerated person further in debt while at the same time denies that person access to any kind of government support like housing assistance or SNAP. This treatment also sucks out any ounce of self respect they may have once had. Our system is built on coercion and control and it needs to stop. It is dehumanizing. It reinforces the myth of the “deserving” versus the “undeserving”. People pushed through this system hear the message loud and clear and know which group they are in. All of this is damaging and not helpful.

Carol Widder

Fayetteville