When I hear folks with no direct experience, knowledge or even a sense for things as they are for this country’s incarcerated citizens attempt to pontificate at length on things that we – who live in it – could elucidate, I just lower my eyes and shake my head. Not at them, but at us. We who know the pain and shame of prison violence and human debasement first hand realize that it is not a reality show on T.V. to entertain the curious. Maybe history teaches us so little because we, both as perpetrator and as victim, will not explain that it doesn’t end when the show is over, nor does it end with a score or victory like a sport. It continues eating into the mind, body and soul, like a cancerous worm.
It’s not always the huge evils — the self-evident ones like the prisoner who brutalizes his cell-mate all night and then kills him just as the doors roll open to start the day; The mentally ill prisoner who is locked in the scalding shower of a prison’s mental health unit until her is dead; The prisoner who gets Raped simply because he is alone and isolated; The prisoner who gets beaten to death by a squad of guards, just because he won’t shut up . . . there are the subtle, covert evils that occur daily: prisoners in confinement, segregation and mental health units who are being denied the right to shower; Being served food with tobacco spit in it or given “air trays” (trays without food); The verbal debasement of the voiceless ones, day and night; The assaults and extortions of the elderly prisoners, who have paid their dues with decades of life and loss; The subjugation of the non-gang prisoners, who are forced slaves and “hold downs” for gang weapons, drugs and illegal cell phones; The transexual and homosexual prisoners running for their lives from religious gang sects; The high-jacking of the religions, religious sacraments creeds and symbols from traditional believers, to be used by gang sects only; The pauper prisoner who stinks, even after showering, because the prion system will not pay wages for work rendered.
Well, it just goes on and on, and at the tax payer’s expense, because the prison administrators have an agenda that is slanted at the tax dollar. Do you ever wonder why prison is so dangerous and depraved? Well, wonder no longer, because I can tell you why. The prisoners do not establish the tone and the atmosphere within the prisons; They are established by the people who run the prisons, and the danger and depravity are infused into it in order to create the high statistical data needed in order to lobby for more prisons, more guards, higher pay grades and more power. I have to say, and I’m sure that you will agree . . . that is far too high a cost for such an unworthy cause.
This is the way of it and no one should pretend otherwise. In prison we are told, “well, let’s just not worry about those things” by the prison investigators and psychologists, “after all, this is prison and everyone has to find a way to deal with it, not just you.” Anything to condition us for more maltreatment – they have created a new self-structure for the prisoner and it’s not just the individual it will haunt, but the whole of society.
Negatively altering a human’s self-structure will subsequently impact the behavior they inhabit in a negative way. Like a poorly trained animal, we are trained and forced away from wellness, not toward it; And a maladjusted person is simply the opposite of a fully-functioning one, whom is ready to take place in society.
The abusers in prison, whether guard or prisoner, are deeply troubled and textbook sadists, who easily choose their victims from out of the hostile prison environs. Their common victims are those who passively comply, or even volunteer as an only option. Seizing on the weak and vulnerable, they use physical, psychological, emotional, sexual, financial abuses, deny medical/mental health treatment. The abuser minimizes the harm he causes, denies all wrong doing and totally blames the victim.
It is so very easy to find someone to lie in favor of the human rights violations in prison, but all too hard to find one who will speak the truth against it, and speak the truth and speak the truth…
Until finally he is heard.
Grace Moskowitz: Writing and Art 