Inmate-Convict-Felon-Guest?

09/24/2021 by J. Nelson

“What’s in a name?” isn’t a trick question.
It’s a dumpster for opinions.

Before Andrew Cuomo walked out the door, the 56th Governor of New York signed Senate Bill S3332, amending the language of New York state law to replace all instances of the words “inmate” or “inmates” with the words “incarcerated individual” or “incarcerated individuals.”

Our national dialog on the power of names, be they for sports teams or co-worker pronouns, gave rise to SB S3332 and its approval. To those who wonder what purpose the bill might serve, the idea is to leave no stone unturned in seeking ways to lift negative reinforcement, terminology, and training. And considering how indelibly the American public has been trained to recognize those behind bars, it’s no surprise that some are crying, “Them too? What, they’re guests now?”

As if the premise of recognizing humanity wouldn’t include people who have broken the law.

But yes, widening the front lines of the identity war to include the incarcerated is already goading some into throwing up their hands. “New York lawmakers must have tortillas for brains,” whistles a Law Enforcement Today editorial, “because that’s the only way someone could wrap their mind around this legislation and think it actually is going to somehow make attaining gainful employment and housing easier after someone is released from prison.” The piece goes on to call the legislation dumb and pointless.

Which it might be, if SB S3332’s aim was to make those things easier. Instead it’s an attempt––finally––to limit the countless ways in which we make it unnecessarily harder to prevent recidivism and promote post-incarceration success. The same dismissive article also quotes the text of the bill:

“Studies have shown these terminologies have an inadvertent and adverse impact on individuals’ employment, housing and other communal opportunities. This can impact one’s transition from incarceration, potential for recidivism, and societal perception. As a result, this bill seeks to correct outdated terminology used to refer to incarcerated individuals.”

Since humanitarian acknowledgement isn’t revoked at sentencing, what’s so objectionable about putting it on paper? When you live in a concrete box, simple gestures are magnified. Encouraging offenders to see their bottom as a bounce is a matter of life-and-death. It’s something that starts with correction’s leadership and lives in the very paperwork of confinement.

Imagine living inside a Department of Motor Vehicles, say, one that’s located inside of a parking structure. If you can picture this, you have a good grasp of what it’s like to live in prison. Forget about having a visitor or buying Chapstick without the right authorization: white, blue or canary. And 20 to 40 times a day, you identify yourself using only your last name and inmate number, a number technically assigned to a case file, not a person. But nobody knows the difference after a while. We’ve gotten used to thinking of inmates as numbers, and the narrowness of this thinking is reinforced with every “Inmate, wait here!” and “Inmate, where’s your permission slip?”

“If you can’t do the time…” yeah-yeah-yeah.

This continual degradation or any of the other downsides to human warehousing is not actually a part of the punishment to which one is sentenced in a courtroom. One is sentenced to a period of confinement and/or time during which one is disqualified from fully participating in society. Everything else––including the dehumanization that we enable by allowing it to persist beyond the perimeter walls––is “bonus justice.” I’ve written about that before here and here, and it’s just as true for names as it is for actions.

What do we civilians know about the soul grinding effects of this genericized use of “inmate,” “felon,” and “convict,” be these “names” spoken or documented in court transcripts, work assignment evaluations, or in the language of social services law, county and general municipal law, civil rights, election, and labor law? It’s long past time we end this bonus justice.

Personally, I favor “adult offender,” because one can stop offending, whereas one can’t stop inmating or feloning. It can be damaging to conflate one’s actions with who they are, and downright damming to assign that misnomer linguistic permanence.

Yet some folks still can’t or won’t see past a name. There will be those who hear about the NY legislation and insist, “They did something wrong: No special treatment for inmates!” These taxpaying geniuses couldn’t care less about how a reduction in denigrating terminology can serve the ultimate goal of redirecting offenders rather than simply recycling them. But if they don’t care what certain names can do to a person, could they grasp what their continued use will do?

Because:

-They will reduce self-direction, until “follow the yellow line to the showers” becomes the only way to live.
-They will reduce self-image to the point where scoring oneself a roll of toilet paper (or a fix) = a good day.
-They will reduce self-esteem in such a way that it can only be regenerated via prison codes and philosophy.
-They will reduce a need for self-expression and replace it with a need to enforce.

The question is, then, are we so unwilling to let go of our preconceived ideas of what others “deserve” that we’re ok with such a cost?

“I confused things with their names: that is belief.”
––Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

Nursing Covid-19 in Prison

01/11/2021 by J. Nelson

Couldn’t care less about “criminal scum”? Then how about one of your heroes – of the frontline healthcare variety?

Among the key findings in a September 2020 report from The Council on Criminal Justice is that COVID-19 infection rates for inmates are four times higher than for the general public. Mortality rates are double. As of last summer, prisons in America accounted for 19 of the top 20 clusters of confirmed Coronavirus cases in the United States.

For real time California numbers, check out the Los Angeles Times’ Coronavirus tracker, currently providing updates of cumulative cases, new cases, and deaths by day.

As one who envisions the redirection of adult offenders rather than the mere recycling of them, I urge you to absorb the statistics, detention hotspots, and death counts while imagining the heart and hope that is suspended amidst the ongoing disqualification of those in custody.

The world is a place where nothing is guaranteed, clearly. But since prison is a smaller, simpler microcosm of society, the loss of goal-oriented trajectories, guidance, and rewards in custody is intensified. For many prisoners and detainees with hampered coping skills and emotional and self-management challenges, there are little or no real diversions as exist elsewhere. Coronavirus kills these aspirational programs even quicker than people as infection safeguards are enacted.

Adding insult to injury is what I call bonus justice, by which the incarcerated are treated as eligible for additional hardship and dismay just because, “You’re here, aren’t you?”

But maybe you see the incarcerated as “criminal scum,” and these things don’t offend your humanity. Fine. How ’bout healthcare workers? You like frontline heroes? Think they’re worth something? Then let’s talk about a prison nurse, one who’s been a friend of mine for years.

This particular nurse earned her credentials with the tenacity and dedication of an astronaut in training. I remember her long hours and that pain-in-the-ass car in which her commute was endured. I was surprised when she announced just over a year ago that she’d accepted a nursing position in a men’s prison, and I admire her for putting need above judgment.

At present, my friend is facing the risk of COVID-19 transmission every single day, and she does so in an atmosphere of fiercely elevated environmental, personal, and psychological vigilance. The emotional and cognitive burden she carries would simply snap many of the rest of us — and that’s without Coronavirus-related fears. Prison is a minefield of rules to remember, and protocols are substituted as abruptly as security requires. Sure, my friend can leave each night, but she’s no less subjected to the righteousness of an amped-up military chain-of-command than are the badges and bad guys. How “at home” could she be with barbed wire, gate buzzers and barking men in her head?

Additionally, as citizens, we use our values and principles to judge each other, with courtesy and manners acting as referees. On the prison yard, philosophies and integrity just square off. In the aftermath, it’s up to whoever’s left standing to pester someone behind a fortified walk-up window for a band-aid. Meanwhile the dread and the aggressive energy of gang ideation never lets up. The cartoonish yet unfunny macho posturing is woven into her work-language, as are minute-to-minute suspicions and charity-killing levels of bureaucracy.

On an average day, this is just some of what my nurse friend has to shake off during her (long) drives home. Now she has the danger of bringing COVID home with her, too. How many of these tensions have morphed, I wonder, into corrosive strains of their own by the time she pulls into the driveway?

There have been 139 reported Coronavirus deaths among prison staff, but since testing information is sporadic and not all states release info on prison employees tested for COVID-19 – these critical frontline workers are forced to speculate, trade rumors, and hope they’re being given the straight story. In that way, at least, they’re just like inmates they serve.

“The nurses are so behind because there are soo many medical emergencies,”

UPDATE:

Los Angeles Times front page – January 13th, 2021:
“The nurses are so behind because there are soo many medical emergencies…”

On Bonus Justice

10/13/2020 by J. Nelson

The national dialog on prison reform exists on a steep, 30° hill. Engaging a public taught by film and television to recognize life behind bars only as rape, riots and rotten food makes it a difficult climb.

Once started, the conversation is always in danger of sliding downward into, “Well, they should have thought of that before they went to prison.” And this, in itself, is a trained reaction. It’s an octopus arm of what I’ve long defined as “bonus justice.”

Some maintain that prisoners, while serving their time, shouldn’t be allowed to vote. I disagree, but regardless of where one sides in that debate, the continued denial of voting rights for parolees and ex-felons –– in some cases for life –– is inarguably bonus justice.

A prison guard inventing infractions to punish an unwelcome or shunned inmate is another good example. So, too, are the actions of jailers who believe they’ve been called upon to represent the public interest through the spirit of vengeance.

“Justice is for the courtroom,” inmates often remind their keepers, and they’re right. Still, show me a corrections professional and I’ll show you someone forced to navigate the ideations of state-sponsored payback on an inhuman level.

It’s one thing to lean on the mantra, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” But frontline custody personnel who take bribes or embolden gang values while making statements like, “He should’a thought of that before he got sent to my Yard” –– ?

Yep, bonus justice.

But maybe that’s too cliché. Fine. Say your boozy cousin gets 18 months for his fifth DUI and winds up in a minimum security facility, the one with the cow fence around it. Score, right? No gang warfare in his future. He might even earn himself a welder’s certification. But he’s incarcerated during one of California prisons’ recurring outbreaks of Valley Fever. On laundry day, he’s handed an infected pillow case. With the state’s (very) long history of failing to provide even minimal constitutional levels of healthcare in its prisons, his illness can be viewed as bonus justice.

Or how about an assigned caseworker administratively burdening an offender whose crime is personally disagreeable? What about a Watch Commander who protects, rather than questions, facility practices that steer certain ethnicities toward or away from favored work assignments? Bonus justice is right there for all to see, but it’s often obscured by conditioning, casual neglect, and indifference.

Interested in seeing if you yourself are as un-progressive as all that?

Read Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Kiera Feldman’s harrowing front page account of what the March-to-May pandemic period was like for female inmates forced to make 3,500 masks per week, many of whom were prohibited from wearing one themselves.

And as you’re reading, if at any point did you decide, “They should have thought of that before…,” take note of it.

Because despite my own former incarceration, this learned, punitive, and bitter convention flashed itself at me as well. And while it may be an uphill climb, we can ––in fact we must–– be better than bonus justice.