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.
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