Lamp, lifeboat, and ladder

The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal law.

I took that quote out of the June edition of The Washington Spectator. This is from the Speaker's Corner article by Elizabeth Gaynes. She is quoting the filing by the Corrections Corporation of America with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This kind of document is what a corporation uses to notify shareholders how they intend to make money and what might influence their ability to turn a profit.

Translation:

We make more profit when we keep our prisons full. So going easy on enforcing laws means less profit. If a judge is allowed to be lenient in the punishment of a crime we'll make less profit, so we are for laws that mandate minimum punishment and the higher the minimum the better. If a judge is allowed to use mediation or restorative justice techniques we make less profit, so we're against their use. If convicts are more likely given parole we'll make less profit, so we are against sentences that include parole and against laws that increase the possibility of parole. Some of our convicts are there because they used or sold marijuana, so legalizing pot means less profit.

That's the part of Gaynes' article that jumped out at me. It confirms what will happen when jail systems are privatized -- these corporations will lobby for harsher sentencing. This is a big reason why prison systems need to be run by the government.

The rest of the article is pretty good too. She highlights the work of Thomas Mott Osborne who worked for prison reform in the 19th Century. His basic question was:

Shall our prisons be scrap heaps or human repair shops?

Poet Rumi wrote this line 700 years ago:

Be a lamp, a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help people's souls to heal.

Languishing in prison affects more than the inmate. It affects the spouse and children.

There is a bit of movement in Congress and state legislatures for prison reform. The driver is cost. However, that runs up against lobbyists from prison corporations.

New York has no private prisons. Due to decreased crime the state is closing them. One of them is being turned over to the Osborne Association to be turned into a reentry center to help inmates rejoin society. That center intends to be the lamp, lifeboat, and ladder.

When people got to prison, they learn to be prisoners. When they leave prison, as most of them will, they need to relearn who to be members of our communities.

In a related article in the same issue of WS attorney and author Chase Madar reviews the book Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert A. Ferguson. In describing the book, Madar wrote:

Disease, rape, abusive and undertrained guards, overcrowding, profit motive, hair-trigger isolation confinement, mostly beyond the purview of legal redress: many of our prisons are everyday legal black holes. The goal of rehabilitation has been trampled to death and only raw punishment remains. As a young Home Minister, Winston Churchill correlated a nation's degree of civilization to the way it treats its criminals.

Why?

Ferguson searches for that answer rather than try to sell a ten-point prison reform plan. His book is a survey of the major philosophers of punishment, including Machiavelli, John Calvin, Kant, Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Melville, Dante, and Nietzsche ("Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.").

The Washington Spectator site is still being redesigned, so no links are available.