Does Incarceration Really Affect Us All?

Credit: Laporte County Sheriff's Office

The idea for this week’s post focusing on pop culture came from the idea that by writing about one person’s experiences, I was giving the speaker an audience but not starting a larger discussion.

It was easy to discredit my sources’ stories as issues that wouldn’t affect most other people.

I discovered this after a conversation with a friend about Clare, who lost her brother to an alternative program for drug addicts, and Shaq, who lost his brother because of a murder conviction and his mother for bad checks.

The friend responded by saying, my brother is in college, and my parents can provide for us, so I guess I’m good.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Was he “good?” I could explain to him that as a taxpayer he was affected, but it didn’t seem worth it. He said he didn’t know anyone close to him who’d gone to jail. So it made me wonder, how do I make my topic relevant to people who don’t have interact with the system directly?

I thought it would be a good idea to look at larger influences that demonstrate how we’re affected. So I came up with four reasons the incarceration system is relevant to everyone:

As a taxpayer

There is no denying it; the incarceration system is expensive. According to Vera the Institute of Justice, “the total price to taxpayers was $39 billion, $5.4 more than the $33.5 billion reflected in corrections budgets alone.” According to the same report, these extra costs were employee benefits, retiree benefits, hospital and care for the prison population, underfunded pensions and state contributions to pensions and retiree health care.

This is not a critique of whether it’s unnecessarily expensive and should cut down, but a simple note on how expensive and how we foot  a lot of the bill.

As a Viewer

Earlier, I spoke about how pop culture can shape our thinking of prison. For some of us, it’s glorified, for others it’s put down and crime is deterred. However, by being so negative on crime and criminals we allow the behaviors that strip them of their rights to flourish. We allow shady dealings to happen. As of now, we know that with the privatization of prison, many in these administrations are incredibly corruptible and prisoners have no outlet to speak. Pop culture becomes the voices of these facilities, and unfortunately this voice doesn’t represent the inmates very well. Nobody should want to go to jail but we also shouldn’t think whatever injustices they sustain are deserved.

As a human rights advocate

Again, we know that many rights we see on the “outside” are stripped. And many people think this is only right. But at what point do we draw a line and remind ourselves that inmates are still human.

Prisoners often don’t see good health care, their mental health isn’t properly assessed nor cared for. Transsexual inmates are also horribly abused by inmates and sometimes by ruthless guards. We may not agree what hormones or operations should be available to transsexual inmates, but abuse should be a universal concern.

As an academic

If you consider yourself intelligent about society, history or politics, then you understand how large a role incarceration has played in all three. From Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. it can make a huge political statement that turns the tides of society. It can also showcase huge problems a nation is facing: to the disproportionate population of blacks and Hispanics in America to the impoverished natives in Latin America. Incarceration, and more importantly who is incarcerated can say more about a nation then its leaders can.

Although this a short list with reasons that barely scratch the surface, it’s enough to start us thinking. And the first question we have to ask ourselves is: what do we believe the incarceration experience should be? Should it be about punishment (and therefore rights aren’t as important), should it be about rehabilitation or determent? However, one thing is for sure: incarceration affects us all, some more than others. You may not be taking collect calls from loved ones, an inmate, or the one working in the system, but you are affected regardless. Therefore, we have all a stake.