Prison Reform Research Paper

Prison Reform
Learn to recognize the influence of socially sanctioned hatred. What I mean by socially sanctioned hatred is simple: We human beings seem to have a built-in temptation to objectify other groups of people in order to feel superior to them or to find a scapegoat for all our problems. It's reflected in language, in words like "nigger," "Faggot," "slant-eyes," "gook," and so on. Certainly, among most of us, that kind of prejudicial speech is not acceptable. And yet, among decent people, from liberal to conservative, it is still socially acceptable to call criminals "scum," "sleaze bags," or "animals." We hear that one demented soul kidnapped and killed a little girl, and a few weeks later, when a teenager steals our car radio, we are ready to strap the two of them together in the gas chamber. "I'm sick of these animals," we say. "They're all alike. Let them
I know one fellow who was arrested for participating in a Quaker peace vigil and was jailed in lieu of paying a ten-dollar fine. In a forty-eight- hour period, he was savagely raped and traded back and forth among more than fifty violent prisoners. That was twenty years ago, and since then he has had years of therapy, and yet he has never recovered emotionally. His entire life still centers around the decision of one prison superintendent to place him in a violent cellblock in order to "teach him a lesson." Most nonviolent offenders do in fact learn a lesson: how to be violent. Ironically; we spend an average of $20,000 per year, per inmate, teaching them this. For less than that we could be sending every nonviolent offender to college. None of us, including prison staff, should accept violence as a fact of prison life, and it would be easy not to. We could designate certain facilities as zero-violence areas and allow inmates to live there as long as they don't commit-or even threaten to commit-a single violent act. The great majority of prisoners would sign up for such a place, I