YOUR NEIGHBOR'S PUBLIC EXECUTION

People go to prison every day. Whether we call them convicts, prisoners, offenders, or the Orwellian 'inmate-patients,' that's what they are: people. They do not lose their humanity because of where they are. People in prison are like people who are not in prison. They have hopes and fears. They dream, they laugh, they cry, they think about the future, or the past. They live.

One often-cited truth about prisons is that most of the people in them will eventually get out. In other words, they will be somebody's neighbors. Whose interests does it serve, then, to subject our neighbors to needless cruelty before they move in?

Under the guise of 'the people's right to know,' the news media has made a habit of celebrating the destruction of lives and families. Little the news relays to its audience is more wanton than the details of crimes and the people who commit them. The 'information' splashed across these tabloid screens is as gratuitous as gore in a slasher flick. Besides grabbing attention – and advertising dollars – these orgies of misery serve no positive purpose.

In fact, treating crimes as drama and trials as entertainment does our communities a grave disservice. Portraying people who break the law as animals, monsters, fiends, and villains grants audiences free rein to indulge in victimhood, to be outraged and demand vengeance, to cease thinking and simply hate. Destroying a person's humanity is a time-honored tradition that makes it palatable to society to consign the targets of their ire to inhuman treatment.

The challenges of returning to that society as a less broken and dysfunctional person are already daunting. The court system is well endowed with the ability to inflict punishment and needs no help from the news reporter. Yet rather than remain objective, it is the media who launches salvo after salvo, attacking people when they are at their most vulnerable before burying the carcasses beneath yesterday's headlines. For a moment of bloody glee, the target is forever scarred.

There exists no equivalent attention for positive achievements. No newspaper celebrates the person's success against all odds when they come to terms with the traumas that led them to prison and earn release by working hard to put those antisocial behaviors behind them. Instead, if the media acknowledges the release at all, it is only to dredge up the past and exclaim that mercy is unwarranted.

That is a profoundly cynical stance to take for those who claim to be the voices of our collective conscience.

Media fearmongering accomplishes nothing, save for alienating the person going to prison even further from society, which in turn makes returning whole that much more unlikely. This undermines the entire reasons prisons supposedly exist: to convert dangerous people into ones able to be a productive part of harmonious society. To be our neighbors.

While I would never argue that the news media does not have the right to be as appealing to the basest human instincts as it pleases, piling harm atop harm heals no one. Only once we reject such appeals for the blatant attempts to erode our empathy that they are can we live with, rather than in fear of, our neighbors.

We Are All Witches and Warlocks

 Human beings are hope machines. From our first moments to our last breaths, we think, we wonder, we imagine. We dream.

Hope is our magic. Hope flows in our blood, fuels our ambitions, lifts us up when we fall flat. Hope is our modern sorcery.

The essential strength of humanity is that even when it is reduced to only one human, each one of us still carries the embers of hope. That ember smoulders, capable of reigniting the full range of possibilities. It can blaze like a hearth that warms the grandest castle, or it can rage like a forest fire that burns the whole world to ashes. Our intentions direct our power towards creative or destructive purposes, but the ember itself is nearly impossible to extinguish. Even when it goes cold for decades it can flicker back to life without losing its potency.

The achilles heel of our criminal justice system is that it blinds itself to this reality. Prisons do not take into account the fact that this sorcerous spark exists irrespective of a person’s external situation. Hope springs eternal, as they say, and within each human being can be found a bottomless well of the stuff. A wise irrigator would channel that implacable flow towards barren fields that could once more become fertile, rather than dedicating themselves to fruitless efforts to dam up what cannot be contained.

Human beings need no external motivation to feed the ember of hope. In such a self-contained system as the hopeful heart, attempts to quash its nature only engender the development of alternative means by which its visions can be realized. If our prisons abandoned the doomed road of trying to eradicate hope and instead nurtured that vital human spark, we could direct untold energy into positive changes within the world we all share.

Warring against a person’s hopes and dreams achieves nothing save for further alienating them. They become resentful, but no less driven. If we set aside our labels and judgements - if we take off our blinders - it becomes obvious what a dangerous proposition this is for society. We have the opportunity to transform the lost people filling our prisons into allies, builders, and creators. What benefit is there, then, to instead manufacture enemies? Hope is free, but aligning ourselves against it costs us everything.

Society is made up of people, and it is not a zero sum game. When a person behaves in a way that runs counter to society’s interests, they also act against their own interests. If an individual makes law and order, harmony, compassion, and the other pillars of society into foreign concepts, it stands to reason that they’ve decided their interests and society’s no longer coincide. Rather than using their antisocial actions as justification for further tormenting someone already cast out from the warmth and kindness of the healthy, happy, safe, community-centered world we all hold as the ideal, we can move closer to the ideal by using our great collective power to identify the roots of our exile's disillusionment. From there we can lay the groundwork for them to find their way back to wholeness, and home.

Redemption need not be freely given, nor made easy to obtain, but to strip away the essential humanity of another human being is beyond the power of any society, however grand it may be. No matter how far away we send our undesirables, in their mirrors they still see reflections of us. Human feet are driven by hope and will always walk. The ember of hope burns no less bright in the darkness of exile. It behooves us to light a fire for the banished to place on the horizon ahead of them, not the one behind.

Dying of Spite

Imagine you are unwell. Someone calls an ambulance and you are whisked away to the hospital. There you meet your doctor, who takes down your history, gives you a thorough examination, then tells you that the hospital won’t do anything to help you, nor will you be discharged. You can but wait to die.

Ridiculous as such a scenario sounds in a civilized world, it happens every day. We are bearing witness to a mass casualty event and squabbling over pennies, politics, and philosophies while people lay dying underfoot. As they beg for help we bandy rhetoric, debating vague ‘solutions’ too divorced from reality to ever bear fruit. Finally they fall silent, resigned to the only fate we don’t exclude. In the wake of their passing we congratulate ourselves for our wisdom: helping would have been a waste of our precious time. Worse – if we didn’t succeed, we might appear to be fools.

We are the biggest fools on the planet

Human beings are not naturally inclined to quit. When we fall down, we get back up. When a bridge collapses, we rebuild it. When a plane crashes, we don’t forswear flying. Our dauntless species scarcely hesitates to tackle any number of grand challenges, yet when it comes to fixing our prison system we can't give up fast enough. Surrender is our default position the moment incarceration enters the conversation, our hands thrown skyward so long that we’ve lost sight of the thumbs we evolved in order to do what humans do best: effect solutions to our most pressing problems.

Prisons are man made disasters, spanning generations and swallowing millions of lives. Of its many failings, our justice system’s ultimate punishment is the most egregious. Beyond questions of morality, there exists no greater waste than executing someone. To impose the death penalty upon a single person takes decades and costs millions – for zero benefit. Nobody looks back fondly on an execution: “remember when we killed Joe? That was great. Life’s so much better now.” and besides the acute waste, capital punishment carries a grave opportunity cost as well.

What could the person we throw away have done in the half a lifetime it takes for the state to kill them, were we to give them the chance? Thirty years can pass as these cases wind through the torturous appellate process – we can turn a fetus into a brain surgeon in less time. To pretend we are incapable of discerning the roots of a person’s behavior and guiding them back to wholeness in the same span is absurd. But we don’t even try.

And it is not only those we condemn that we are failing. While thousands are living to die on death row, hundreds of thousands are sentenced to lifetimes in prison, dying to live more than the basest existence. Rather than offer them a path towards a positive, productive future, we treat them as if they were lepers. When our prisons operate like doctorless hospitals, what outcome might we reasonably expect? Some lucky few may pull through, but we can take no credit for successes that occur in spite of our best efforts to prevent them.

Hospitals are filled with the sick and injured. Prisons brim with the same, except the wounds tatter hearts and minds. Hospitals hold our society’s most vulnerable members in their care, tasked with returning them to wellness. Prisons are no different, except we root against healing. There is no question that the patients who fill prison wards deliver themselves into their own predicaments. They are not blameless, but that makes them no less ailing. 

Just as the doctor would never withhold treatment from the smoker, the fast food fanatic, or the exercise avers, it is abhorrent to withhold treatment from the people we incarcerate because we resent their antisocial behavior. It is, in fact, monumentally short-sighted to do so when those same people, healed or not, will eventually be ground up and spat out of the system and back into the streets of Anytown, USA to make room for even more shattered souls. Alienated or not, they are coming.

Human beings are the least helpless species on this Earth. With our hands and minds and wills we have accomplished wonders to make even the most strident pessimist crack a smile. Our Homeric failure to fashion a carceral system that does anything but undermine the foundational values of our society, then, is born not from honest trial and error but from a brainless knee-jerk reaction to blame patients for their illnesses.

It’s time to abandon our surrender and start using our thumbs.

2024 January 18