Is the system broken????

Is there justice in our prison system? Or The system that governs our prisons.

Outside of the prison walls, when you commit a crime and are caught, you are charged, brought before a judge and perhaps a jury of your peers, and a trial brings forth a decision on your guilt or innocence. Is this a perfect system? No - not by any means, but it is a system that serves our society well and it is by far the best justice system in the world today.

Now you have been sentenced to prison. You arrive at a prison and are presented with a new set of rules and a mini system of justice within the system that brought you there. Is this system perfect? No. Is it close to perfect? No. Is it a justice system that deserves any respect? In my opinion – no it does not.

Where did we go wrong? What happened after sentencing and incarceration that corrupted our system of justice? We bring an individual to serve a sentence in what the prison industry PR Gurus have called a ‘correctional system’. We lock these men and women up in a system of authority and in some cases abuse of authority. Authority does not automatically equal abuse, but the possibility is there.

Here is a very simple example of what I am talking about… A prisoner’s cell is subject to a routine search for contraband. During the search the prisoner’s pillow is ripped open by the Correctional Officer to determine if anything is hidden inside. No contraband is found in the prisoner’s cell or in the pillow. The prisoner is left to clean up his cell and also left with a ripped pillow. The prisoner over the next few months makes three direct requests for a new pillow since the stuffing is falling out of his ripped pillow – the pillow ripped by the Correctional Officer. There is no response to his repeated requests. Fed up with the stuffing falling out of his pillow the prisoner finds the means to sew up the pillow with a needle and thread that he pulled from an old T-shirt. Nine months from the last cell search, the Correctional Officers return for another routine cell search. This time, as with the last, no contraband was found. This time the Correctional Officer on inspection of the prisoners pillow notices that it has been ‘hand stitched’ and then proceeds to rip the pillow open expecting to find something hidden inside. Nothing was found. The Correctional Officer issues the prisoner a violation for ‘destruction of DOC property’. The prisoner requests a meeting with his case worker to review this violation and pleads that if they look in his file that they will find three requests for a new pillow after the last cell search. The prisoner knew that there was proof that the violation was not deserved. The case worker refused to review the prisoners file and stated that the violation stood because the Correctional Officer observed damage to DOC property - the prisoner was guilty based on the Correctional Officer’s observation.

Some will read this and say “So what?”. I read this and I am appalled that this abuse of authority can and does take place. This is a simple situation, this is not a serious violation and did not carry any ‘punishment’ to speak of but that is furthest from the point here. The prisoner is guilty based on the Correctional Officers statement. Proof exists to justify the damage to the pillow, yet the system will not even open the file to verify. The justice system is built inside the prison to support ONLY the statement of the Correctional Officer even if evidence exists to prove the Correctional Officer wrong. This may seem like a situation that most would just excuse as insignificant, but it is not. It is not insignificant because it only identifies that in more serious situations, a Correctional Officer may use his or her authority to make an allegation against a prisoner that is false and the system will support this allegation without question.

I have recently been personally involved in a situation with a prisoner where there was indeed a false allegation made against the prisoner and it was clear (although not proven) that the allegation was made out of a bigoted and discriminatory view held by the Correctional Officer. It was also further substantiated by a case worker that made a direct statement to the prisoner that the ‘violation was crap’ but that he had to find the prisoner guilty based on the statement made by the Correctional Officer. This violation, unlike the one above, was serious and carried a potentially significant and serious punishment. I will not go into more detail with this situation because it is not necessary to make the point. The point being that in certain situations Correctional Officers have the ability to abuse their authority and charge prisoners with violations that are false purely out of anger, retaliation, and/or personal intolerance for an individual or situation. I am by no means stating that all Correctional Officers will act like this – but I will state that most all Correctional Officers are aware of these potential abuses of authority and do not speak up and support the prisoner – they will support their own.

I think what concerns me the most is that until you are 'right inside' this system you have absolutely no idea how corrupt it really is. Three years ago, I lived my life completely ignorant to the corruption that exists in prisons today. I went to work and came home thinking that our system of justice kept me safe by dealing with criminals inside a well developed system of justice. This is not the case. Once inside the system of justice, the laws that we respect on the outside are gone. The justice that we expect on the outside is gone. Any Prisoner still has the right to truth and justice even when inside our prison system. What happens inside our prison system however is not based on truth and justice, but often pure abuse of authority that stems from racism, discrimination, and personal intolerances of the authority figure. How can you possibly expect any Prisoner to rehabilitate from a system of justice that in itself is corrupt and allows abuses of authority to take place?

I understand the need for throwing someone in prison and removing their rights. We must have law and order and there must be punishment for those that break the law - but not to the extent that the 'system' punishing these law breakers can now run in a corrupt manner with no responsibility to what is right and wrong, moral, or ethical. How can we then expect to return an individual to society that can function within the rules of what is right and good and accepted when the system that is responsible to punish them is corrupt and does not work in a trustworthy and just manner!

The prison system where we have housed these men and women has just succeeded in teaching prisoners to be unethical, discriminatory, how to circumvent rules, be subjective, and to expect to be abused, mistreated, and wrongly handled even when you do something that is right. What it boils down to is that it does not matter how good you are, the corrupt system will find a way to interfere with you and teach you to not respect the authority that is the very authority responsible for your rehabilitation and ‘correction’

The system is broken.

September 11, 2004