The penitentiary movement and harm to this culture

As I wrote on my post for 21 May, the original penitentiary movement was meant to do away with cruel and unusual punishment and replace it with a system based on Christian thought and oriented towards rehabilitation. In fact, there are three words that are often found in discussions of our prison system:

• Rehabilitation — the restoration of someone to a useful place in society
• Retribution — punishment or vengeance for evil deeds
• Recidivism — habitual relapse into crime

Another way to put it is that these three words are the three R’s of the debate over penology in our nation. The Quaker initiative was the attempt to try more humane treatment with the expectation that this would decrease the rate of recidivism. They argued that retribution had not worked and that the crime rate was still strong despite the use of public capital punishment, public torture in some cases, and harsh punishment. They argued that we needed to use rehabilitation. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, their approach only led to an insanity and death rate so high that within 40 years, they had to revise it. The very solitary confinement, silence, and meditation that they thought would lead to rehabilitation was instead a torture technique that is still used, to this day, by many governments. So, instead of ending cruel and unusual punishment, the Quakers ended up being the authors of one of the most modern techniques of painless torture.

The Quakers did not foresee that there would be many people who would be willing to lock people up under the harshest of conditions. They also did not foresee that, as the prison population continued to increase, that voters would be increasingly unwilling to adequately fund the system. And, as it became obvious that solitary confinement in silence was a horrendous non-Christian torture technique, they did not foresee what it would mean to have a mixed prison population. They did not foresee that with insufficient guards, the prisons would become hell-holes in which gangs controlled the inner workings of the prison. They did not foresee that prisons would become the schools of future criminals. They failed to take into account the unwillingness of people to hire those who had been in those hell-holes. And, they failed to take into account that there are those who are truly evil, though many in the prison population are not truly evil.

But, worse has been the effect on our culture. You probably have never noticed it or thought about it. But, we now have cable TV shows, more than one, that show “raw” footage from the prisons. They delight in showing the fights, the stabbings, the murders. They delight in showing the brutality that is found in a modern American prison, all for your entertainment. But, even before that, the movies have enjoyed savagely teasing criminals (or supposed criminals) with what they will encounter in jail. How many times have you seen a TV show in which a detective will “convince” a person to cooperate by threatening to send them to Ryker’s Island, or the equivalent local place? They are able to “convince” them because those “holding” jails are so terrible. How many times have you seen a movie in which the “hero” teases the villain at the end by pointing out to him that there will be a large convict waiting for him that will name him “Shirley” and make him his b****? And the worse part is that everyone knows that this is what will happen, and we laugh with the hero!

You see, the way in which we run our prison system in the USA has changed us. We now delight in thinking about the cruel and unusual punishment that people will receive. We all know about the mistreatments and rather than doing anything about it, we consider it their due. Were we truly committed to preventing cruel and unusual punishment, we would vote the taxes necessary to ensure sufficient guards in a sufficient space to control the prison population. Sadly enough, we even rail against the courts that have had to step in to force us to change, claiming that they are bleeding-heart liberals, as though wanting to prevent cruel and unusual punishment is a liberal thing.

And so, the Quaker experiment has misled us. Rather than becoming a nation that treats its criminals in better ways, leading to rehabilitation, we have now become a nation that has no problems with putting people in horrendous conditions. Where are our Christian ideals? Long gone in this area. Rehabilitation has given way to retribution. And, not just a quick retribution, but a slow and long-lasting and painful retribution, one that we broadcast, one that is built into our movies, and one that violates just about every Christian principle that the Quakers were trying to instill.

That is the sad legacy of the Quaker experiment.

===MORE TO COME===