Prisons are time machines

Some thoughts: Prisons are like microscopes: if you look deeper into the reality of a prison you are able to see the major problem within the society, and prisons are also like time machines: what you detect as problems within a prison, it will appear also in the society pretty soon. If a legal system operates well in a society, prisons function also on a higher level. If human rights prevail in a prison system, if regime rules are transparent, and the behavior of staff is predictable, the prison system is closer to a situation lacking dysfunctions. There are several symptoms of the inner prison world implying major disturbances of the outside world:

- permanent gang wars in the prison system: escalating ethnic conflicts outside, criminal injustice, racist criminal justice and law enforcement

- poor prison conditions: lack of cohesion in the society, polarization of political beliefs, huge gap between poor and rich

- major drug problem in prison: lack of proper drug strategies outside, disharmony amongst supply, demand and harm reduction

- obvious corruption of the prison staff: general corruption of the whole state, bureaucratic masking of criminal and official confluence

- high rate of prison suicide: intensive illegitimate retribution toward some types of criminal behaviors (i.e. sexual offences), taboos hiding amongst smaller communities

Tags: drug, prison, staff, suicide

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Comment by Gergely Fliegauf on February 29, 2012 at 10:54: Dear Maggie, thank you for reading my post. Hungary has also a relatively humane prison system, though staff salary and reputation is really low, therefore the mentality of some officers is not proper.

If you read Foucault (Discipline and punish) you can realize that prisons are far from being humane. As a recently operating prison official (I try to teach prison officers) I can not mention a better option to substitute prisons. The upper parts of law enforcement and criminal justice is an other issue. "Here" at the bottom of these two systems "we" quite often see that inmates suffer from inherited harms caused by the both or by education, public healthcare, domestic violence, drugs etc, and "we" are unable to heal these wounds...

Comment by Maggie Hall on February 28, 2012 at 21:18: I have always thought of prisons as "incubators" of all these negative things. Prisons often see the emergence of new physical diseases and illnesses first, new strains of flu etc. They work to deepen and intensify social problems and disadvantage so they not only reflect the existence of these things they are part of the way in which disadvantage is magnified, transmitted and maintained. So while I agree that prisons reflect social problems they also maintain and intensify them too. I also think that no matter how transparent and fair, depriving someone of their liberty is intrinsically damaging in a way that continues long after release and has implications for the wider community in the effect it has on interpersonal relationships.

Thanks Gergely for this interesting post. I know that comparatively speaking Australia has a relatively humane prison system. But our rates of incarceration for indigenous people and people with mental illness or intellectual disability are very high and I have seen how damaging even the most humanely run prison ( if there is such a thing!) can be.