the bad guys

At one point in life I believed that there were good guys and bad guys, and that I could trust the authority figures in my life to give the “good” and “bad” designations to the right people.

That belief led to the belief that bad people are in jail – and that people in jail are bad.

I think most of the people who taught me those ideas still believe themselves. It’s easier to ignore prison conditions when you believe that all the people in there deserve whatever punishment they get.

But that’s just not true.

“Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for 40 percent of US prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black males are incarcerated at a rate “more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and “black females are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic females.”

Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow that more black men “are in prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850.” Higher rates of black drug arrests do not reflect higher rates of black drug offenses. In fact, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates.”

Debtor’s prison? Chain gangs? For-profit prisons? Guaranteed capacity in private prisons? How is this even a thing??

“Oil companies have been known to exploit prison labor as well. Following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and irreparably damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP elected to hire Louisiana prison inmates to clean up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men. Coastal residents desperate for work, whose livelihoods had been destroyed by BP’s negligence, were outraged at BP’s use of free prison labor.”

Oh good. Finally someone we believe less worthy than Mexicans:

“Private companies have long understood that prison labor can be as profitable as sweatshop workers in third-world countries with the added benefit of staying closer to home. Take Escod Industries, which in in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico and instead “moved to South Carolina, because the wages of American prisoners undercut those of de-unionized Mexican sweatshop workers,” reports Josh Levine in a 1999 article that appeared in Perpective Magazine.”

I never realized just how much people would lose if we reformed prisons and incarcerations. I thought people were lazy or just didn’t care. Now I see the investment so. many. people have in keeping things the way they are, or even increasing the number of inmates across the country. Horrifying.

“Even politicians have been known to tap into prison labor for their own personal use. In 1994, a contractor for GOP congressional candidate Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty.”

And:

“In an unsettling turn of events lawmakers have begun ditching public employees in favor of free prison labor. The New York Times recently reported that states are “enlisting prison labor to close budget gaps” to offset cuts in “federal financing and dwindling tax revenue.” At a time of record unemployment, inmates are being hired to “paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.” In Wisconsin, prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once held by unionized workers, as a result of Governor Scott Walker’s contentious anti-union law.”

I realized as I kept reading that I also have held the belief that people who have been to jail in the past are bad people. It sounds so childish, and for good reason – it’s something I was taught so early on that I never even noticed it was a part of my psyche. But you know what? If they’ve served time, supposedly we believe their debt is paid. So why continue to punish prisoners by not granting them qualifications (electrician, plumber, etc) upon release? By paying them 11% less just because they have prison time in their background? Why are they forced to work 50 hours a week while incarcerated, but can’t find work when they are released? We have to do better.

Read the whole article on alternet.

*Note: this article was published in 2011.

Also read this.

a new take on addiction and treatment.

“Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.”

The above quote and the below passages are from The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think by Johann Hari, author of ‘Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.’ Read the whole article, it’s worth it.

“This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find – the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding’. A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else…

…But still – surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book ‘The Cult of Pharmacology.’

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism – cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of life ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the one hundred year old war on drugs. This massive war – which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool – is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t the driver of addiction – if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction – then this makes no sense.”

You can buy the book here.