Carrots for Prisoners

No this is not a post about what we are feeding prisoners because frankly, I do not care what they are fed. Instead, this is a new perspective on the "Faint Hope" clause, which is under debate, well, everywhere and always. 

I have always believed that if you murder someone, serve your damn time. If a court convicts you and you are put into jail for eleventy billion years, sucks to be you. (I am not even going to touch on the notion of false conviction here because I have neither the time nor the patience, and the whole issue stinks on ice) and so the Faint Hope clause seemed like a slap in the face. It seemed like the government would bank on the population forgetting the impact of the crime, and would eventually open its arms to the convicts, helping proper rehabilitation.

After a while, however, I was thinking; as Halifax NDP Megan Leslie pointed out if a convict is in prison for 25 years, why should they cooperate with guards or act properly in any way? The clause coerces good behavior from convicts, it offers an incentive for good behavior. A very simplistic approach to classical conditioning,  since convicts are already familiar with the bad behavior = punishment dynamic, this offers another avenue, good behavior leads to benefits. It helps ease the prisoner into the notion of actions having consequences and that we can control our actions and thus the resulting consequences, which is essential for proper behavior in society.

I felt pretty good about this for a few minutes until the cranky part of my brain kicked in; Why the hell should we be pandering? Why the hell should we put up with a system that can be easily exploited by criminals? Where did we go so wrong with our justice system that we have to appeal to criminals because they have the upper hand? Which is what they have; we must cajole and entreat them to behave within our lines. Within this system, they have the power and the freedom, and we must react to their choices. In my opinion, they already make the choices that they feel are the best. It seems ridiculous to believe that they do not understand the connection between their actions and the consequences (as I myself have previously  suggested); they obviously understand it too well, they simply value the outcome too much.

I have always hated the reactive justice system, and this is perhaps the best illustration of why there is a problem, and the fact that every option we can see from here is lousy only underlines how deep the philosophical issue runs. We are attempting to hang a humanist clause on a non-humanist process; we will always fail.

A Prison Inside One's Self

This is a trigger issue for myself, and possibly for others, so grab something to strangle while  you read.

I consider myself open-minded and accepting; hard to offend, most days. One of the issues that I can not abide, however, is the dominant societal image of mentally-ill people. It is true, even with the decades of progress and research that has gone into understanding mental disorders, it is still scarcely understood in popular culture, and misinformation, discrimination, and hatred run rampant. An article published by The Globe and Mail illustrates the kind of narrow-minded view that keeps people with mental disorders in the shadows, afraid of the "shame" of having a mental illness.

Their first case they refer to by a derogatory nickname, "headbanger", because he suffers from schizophrenia that compels him to harm himself. True, this is a prison situation we are discussing here, so some crudeness is to be expected, but the tone of the report continues on to discuss how mentally ill people were "flooding" Canadian Prisons, as if the tide of people being incarcerated would be better if they were not also diagnosable, and refers to them as "demented" which either means suffering from dementia (I hope we are not imprisoning too many Alzheimer's patients) or behaving irrationally due to anger/stress/etc. which describes likely all inmates, with the exception (Har. Har.) of psychopaths, who rarely act out due to emotions.

The news story continues, describing the plight of  "harried staff" who have to "gauge how dangerous they are and place them where they are least likely to run afoul of tougher inmates or try to take their own lives", which is not a problem they have with regular inmates, because no sane prisoner has ever harmed another or tried to take his/her own life. It continues to describe how they take up valuable space and eventually return to the streets, often untreated, to re-offend, again, not problems that occur with "normal" inmates.

Another problem is displayed with the suggestion that there are "other locations that would be preferable for these types of inmates"; true, help and treatment would be preferable, but suggesting that anyone with a mental illness is somehow not responsible for their actions is a dangerous and misguided belief. Many are responsible, and dis-empowering them by assuming they are helpless, ineffective, or broken is both backwards for their rights and our safety. (I can not believe I am arguing about why mentally ill people can be dangerous. I am the worst rights defender ever.)

Functionally, all the complaints leveled at the prison system about why mentally ill people are suffering (lack of care, resources, treatments) can be precisely equated to the case for inmates that are not diagnosable. If we considered therapy to help inmates, in the same way we struggle to help mentally-ill inmates, perhaps the recidivism rate would decrease. Implying that mentally-ill patients are deserving of better care is just creating a system begging to be taken advantage of by anyone who commits a crime and can Google "disorders". It also creates a system, like the problem described by the article, where individuals were in prison who could not even form the intent to commit a crime, since the justice system would just chuck them in prison, denying them a fair trial.

Rather than an article about the issues of mentally-ill people in prison, the whole story reads like a bigoted view of mental patients that could be extended to either anyone in prison, or anyone with a physical disorder in prison. There are so many problems with the prison system right now, it is ridiculous to single out inmates with mental disorders.

The title:
From the song "Prison" by Joseph Arthur, a very nice listen and reasonably related lyrics.