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.