Collateral damage

Who is punished when we sentence someone to prison?

That seems like a silly question, right? The person in prison is punished. He or she did something illegal, harmful, maybe even horrific. In prison, behind bars, living in a cell, living a controlled and constrained life, they are being punished. They are learning that what they did has consequences, and that the consequences are not pleasant.

That’s the idea anyway. But we know that people in prison are also learning other things. Sometimes they are learning how to be better criminals. Sometimes they are learning that no one can be trusted, that being tough is the only way to be, that cruelty is normal, that the only way to feel you have personal power is to have power over others. That nothing ever changes. That they have no value.

We also know that it is not only the person behind bars who is being punished for the crime. It is their children. Children are traumatized–in extensively researched and measurable ways–when a parent is behind bars. Eighty percent of incarcerated women are mothers. More than half of the men in prison are fathers. The consequences (mental, physical, emotional, educational) suffered by their children is collateral damage. A lot of damage. Damage to those who have done nothing wrong.

We also know that entire communities are punished when we punish individuals. That’s because when these men and women return to their communities (and 95 percent of them do), they often return without the education, job skills, or physical and emotional health to live the kind of lives that would enhance their communities. They cannot find affordable housing. They cannot find secure, decent-wage employment. If they are returning to an already impoverished community (and many of them are), then they are adding to the poverty level. Those who go on to commit another crime after release (and many of them do) make their communities a more dangerous place.

When we incarcerate a person who has committed a crime, we are punishing their families, their children and their communities. Is the solution to not punish people who have done wrong? Of course not. The solution is to rethink, reform and restructure our “corrections” system so that it helps create healthy, functioning citizens who are able to parent healthy families and contribute to healthy communities.

If you don’t know much about life behind bars (not the Hollywood version), I write about it in A Grip of Time: When prison is your life.