Postcards from a Prison Pandemic
from a “cloistered brother”
Moon Shot: Part 3
Someone once told me that the criminal justice system is
like a puzzle missing several pieces. It
is confusing, frustrating, and impossible to figure out. For much of my incarceration, I have argued
that part of the reason the criminal punishment system is such an abject
failure is that is disjointed and inefficient, which contributes to it being
confusing, frustrating, and impossible to figure out.
Last weekend, however, my position on the inefficiency of
the criminal punishment system shifted suddenly. As I sat at the table writing, I looked up at
the television. It was turned on but the
sound was muted. On the screen was a children’s educational program recorded at
the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I
took a break from writing to watch the pictures on television. I allowed my mind to drift away from the
present pandemic back to a warm afternoon many years ago when I toured the
Henry Ford Museum. In my memories, I could
recall the large 19th century village outside the main museum that
had been carefully moved and reconstructed at the Henry Ford. I remembered seeing the bus Rosa Park had
been riding on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. I also remember walking through the Henry
Ford Academy, a public charter school that operates inside the museum.
While my mind wandered through my remembrances of the
classrooms of the Henry Ford Academy, I was struck with a fresh understanding of the criminal punishment system. It is not a disorderly and illogical jumble
of confusion. It is instead, a finely
crafted invention. It is a reflection of
Ford’s belief that the efficiency of the assembly line could help improve all
segments of public life, from schools to courts.
Ford, himself, was not able to infuse the DNA of his factory
innovations much further than the schools he built in Michigan. The New Yorker writer and Harvard professor
Jill Lepore wrote about Ford’s early 1900’s education experiment in her
bestseller These Truths. In her research for the book, she uncovered a
pamphlet for one of Ford’s original schools.
It read in part:
This is the human product we seek to turn
out, and as we adapt the machinery
in the shop to turning out the kind of automobile we have in mind, so we have
construct our educational system with a view to producing the human product
we have in mind.
in the shop to turning out the kind of automobile we have in mind, so we have
construct our educational system with a view to producing the human product
we have in mind.
Right about the same time Ford was working to develop an
assembly line for students, the modern American criminal punishment system was
taking shape.
Fast forward one century later and you can see the assembly
line, albeit a complicated one, on full display in every jail, courtroom, and
prison in America. Police mine the raw
material of a human being. The human is
moved along a specially designed assembly line that features exacting divisions
of labor. Prosecutors play their role,
clerks play their role, defense counsels play their role, judges play their
role, and juries play their role, as the human moves along the assembly
line. The human is tugged and pulled,
pushed, and molded. At the end of the line, the raw material of a human being is
barely recognizable. The assembly line
has transformed the raw material of a human being into a prisoner.
The prisoner is then collected and shipped to a warehouse to
be used by the prison system. The
prisoner is utilized to maintain and help run the prison. But the most lucrative output of the prisoner
is his or her ability to increase the earnings of those who are part of the
prison system. The prisoner puts money
into the pockets of guards and administrators, nurses and doctors, teachers, and
clinicians. The prison system seeks to get as many years of
profitable use out of the prisoner as possible.
When the prisoner system can no longer use the prisoner, the system
either abandons the prisoner at the side of the road or buries the prisoner in
a field. The prison then returns to the
assembly line for a new model.
In this edition of Postcards from a Prison Pandemic’s Moon
Shot series, we examine how in a COVID-19 world, the assembly line of the
criminal punishment system must be disassembled in favor of a new model focused
on equitable justice.
We hold people in prison today because that is what their
sentences call for, not because it is the right thing to do, and certainly not
because it is a best practice. The
prison sentence is one of the central tools used to provide efficiency to the
criminal punishment assembly line. The most
efficient sentence is the mandatory minimum sentence. But even today’s sentencing guidelines have
become nothing more in many jurisdictions than a selection from a predetermined
list on a menu. That is because the goal
of the assembly line is not to produce equitable justice, the goal is to
produce a new prisoner.
In a COVID-19 world, the assembly line methodology of the
past century falls apart. Prisons can no
longer hold populations in the same manner as before the coronavirus. And, prisoners can no longer serve prison
systems in the same way. Massachusetts
state prisons are currently in lockdown as are many systems across the
country. During this lockdown, staff
members are cooking meals, picking up garbage, and carrying out many of the
other duties that prisoners would typically do for pennies a day. In addition,
classrooms are empty and there are no programs for staff members to facilitate. The profitability of having prisoners is
gone. And based on the fact that many
health professionals continue to say that we will have future outbreaks of the
new coronavirus, prison lockdowns are now part of the new normal.
Instead of an assembly line, an equitable justice system in
a COVID-19 world would focus on outcomes. In other words, the focus of a sentence
would not be an amount of time in prison, but would instead be a series of
goals. We can see this style of thinking
at work in many drug and mental health courts.
But, some people’s knees get a bit wobbly when the same template is
proposed for violent crimes. Are violent
crimes some great indiscernible mystery?
No. In fact, sociologists,
criminologists and other researchers have done a good job over the past
several decades identifying key factors, like lack of education and low income,
that lead to many violent crimes.
The crux of the problem with using outcome-based sentencing
is that it requires the court to deal with the individual and not the
generic. Our laws and courts are not
currently built to do that. They are
built to deal with nameless and faceless raw materials. If you were to imagine an equitable justice
system that creates customized outcome-based solutions for each defendant, what
would it look like? I can imagine a
hybrid of community-based programs, job training online education, and more that
can be brought together to meet the goals set out in a sentence. None of that needs or should be delivered
inside the warehouses and virus factories that are today’s prisons.
I said early on in this pandemic (and I will keep repeating
it) that the biggest hurdle we face in a COVID-19 world is a lack of
imagination. It is difficult for many to
imagine something other than prisons because that is all we have had for so
long. But look around the world
today. How much of what people are doing
currently could not be imagined only three months ago?
Jill Lepore in These Truths shared the following words from
Henry Ford. “Machinery is the new
Messiah” Ford felt efficiency could
solve any problem. He was wrong. Some challenges cannot be met with mass-produced solutions. In a COVID-19 world,
challenges must be addressed individually.
To le create a truly equitable justice system, the criminal punishment
assembly line must be shuttered forever and replaced with innovative models of
justice.
