The View from Inside: Prison Time Doesn’t Equal Justice

I received a peculiar message through my site, prisonnewsblog.com, from a retired prison warden. After retiring from corrections, the former warden became a professor of criminal justice. He used a book I wrote as a supplemental text to help his students understand confinement from the perspective of prisoners.

In his message, the professor expressed that I “should have been released from prison at the 20-year mark.” He went on to write that I had “accomplished and contributed more than most in the incarceration business but that the system couldn’t let inmates feel that way.”

As I read the message, I realized that the professor meant to convey a compliment, or support. Although I appreciated the gesture, the message saddened me. The professor believed that justice required me to serve 20 years in prison. I felt disheartened by the candid, insider scoop that validated my personal experiences and observations: that those in corrections work to extinguish rather than encourage hope.

What significance did 20 years have? From my perspective, we need to reevaluate this misguided concept of justice that only recognizes time. Ours is a society that strives toward enlightenment, yet we incarcerate more people per capita than any other nation.

The time has long since come for America to change this system. Recidivism rates show its ineffectiveness, and statistics show how costly it is to operate. Who benefits from a criminal justice system that measures justice only through the turning of calendar pages? Society does not.

Those businesses that provide goods and services to our nation’s prison system want long-term imprisonment to continue. The success of those organizations depends upon high prison expenditures. To further the growth, some of those unscrupulous prison operators even bribe judges to send more people to prison. Believing the prison industrial complex wants to see reforms that would lead to a more effective prison system is akin to believing that tobacco companies want to see people stop smoking.

I propose that we stop relying upon the turning of calendar pages to measure justice. A far more effective corrections system would measure justice by the efforts an offender makes to reconcile with society. Such a system would require a fundamental reform. It would have far-reaching benefits to American citizens, though it would present an anathema to prison lobbyists.

This new type of corrections system would encourage all offenders to work toward earning freedom through merit. Rather than succumbing to the pernicious influences of the penitentiary, prisoners would feel motivated to contemplate steps that might redeem their crimes. Through positive prison adjustments, more prisoners would prepare for law-abiding lives. We as a society should rely upon our collective wisdom to encourage such adjustments. Warehousing humanity doesn’t reduce crime. Education reduces crime.

We have ample opportunities to review results from a corrections system that fails to correct. High recidivism rates suggest that the longer society exposes an individual to corrections, the less likely the prisoner becomes to function as a law-abiding citizen upon release.

The former warden makes the case. He wrote that the corrections system, as a matter of policy, does not encourage inmates to accomplish or contribute. This reality offers compelling insight that validates what millions of prisoners experience every day. Prisons extinguish hope. It represents but one of the reasons that measuring justice only through the turning of calendar pages breeds costly and continuing cycles of failure.

In my next article, I will describe the manner of my own adjustment through more than 21 years of continuous imprisonment. That journey has carried me through prisons of every security level, from United States penitentiaries to minimum-security prison camps. I’ve served my entire adult life in prison for drug crimes that involved consenting adults, without weapons or violence. Today’s justice, however, requires that I serve several more years. We need change.

Read Michael Santos' previous post here.