Stagnation in Prisons
by After prisoners vegetate for decades, society will be shocked over and over by actions that will demonstrate how ill prepared they were for release. Furthermore, the system is designed to educate inmates for an economy that no longer exists.
When water stops flowing and is allowed to stand still, it becomes stale and foul. When human minds remain in the same mode of thinking, year after year, they too become stagnant. Only a fool who thinks they know it all, or a couch potato with zero ambition, wouldn’t make the effort to continuously expand their horizons. While everyone has room for improvement, one category of people whose development will actually have an impact on public safety is criminals.
Before Truth in Sentencing, there was an effort to encourage prisoners to improve their thought process so that they could jump through the hoops that would lead to being paroled. The first step in that process was classification, where the Department of Corrections would decide which programs a prisoner needed to complete and which prison to send them to. Most prisoners start out in maximum security, do whatever time and programs need to be done, then go to medium, repeat the process, then get to minimum and have a chance to get released. Under Truth in Sentencing, you could jump through all the hoops Corrections put before you, and still do every day of your sentence. This completely undermined Correction’s classification of program needs, and made the entire maximum/medium/minimum process irrelevant.
While there were many prisoners who failed to take advantage of these opportunities, at least there was an incentive to motivate those who would take advantage of what was offered to grow and one day become law abiding citizens. While many of these programs still exist, and prisoners need to take the initiative to get an eduction, the state’s policies make much of this effort seem irrelevant. Prisoners who make every effort to improve are stuck for extremely lengthy periods in maximum and medium prisons. For those who need that outside motivation of a program, which is most prisoners, there are huge gaps of time where nothing is going on. Prisoners can sometimes wait years to get into a program, or can do all the programs and sit. Over time, the tendency of most prisoners is to focus on attaining the trivial privileges that our prison system has to offer to distract themselves from the soul crushing experience of being warehoused, or doing dead time. Their main goal is to get to medium so they can have plenty of recreation time to play basketball, softball, lift weights, play cards, play, play, play… While some prisoners can think long term and motivate themselves to continue to grow, most fall into a state of stagnation. They get a click of people to eat and hang out with, and then get a routine that is repeated for years on end.
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