Facebook Publication Date: 4/28/2020 23:04

To my mind, people with any degree of compassion can make the shift and pivot to the realization that incarceration, as it is currently practiced, is, *precisely because* of how it is practiced, is cruel and unusual punishment for prisoners; not just prisoners who have not even been found guilty, so we are inflicting gross sanctions on those who are presumed innocent.

As well, it is cruel and unusual not just for those sentenced to what we like to call minor crimes or crimes that did not involve violence, *but also for crimes that did*.

But the realization I’m talking about requires and demands a level of compassion and fictive Imagination.

As we have seen in the last four years, there is a wide swath of people, at least half of our voting population, who do not have this particular attribute. For them, knowing that prisoners, innocent or not, violent or not, are suffering even greater than before merits celebration rather than horror.

This is why I have always been of the opinion that knowledge in and of itself is never enough.

Not in terms of the carceral state, not in terms of race, not in terms of class and income distribution, not in terms of gender, not in terms of lgbtq +.

For some increased knowledge does not engender a shift in position. For some increased knowledge of the pain of others actually makes them double down on their positions and become ever more entrenched.

This comes as a surprise to a lot of people who do have compassion lodged in their marrow.

But we need to be careful about that. The state of current incarceration is fueled by classism and white supremacy; this is no surprise. .

It’s also fueled by us. The good guys.

Jails and prisons are one place where we do not feel the need for congruence in our position of peace and love and compassion.

We feel once removed from prisons and jails, and we outsource the cruelty and the inhumane conditions and the violent punishment on to others.

This issue is not just for The Usual Suspects, not just for those with MAGA hats.

Every single time a community says no to a halfway house in their zip code, or a recovery home, or a harm reduction program located nearby , they are saying basically the same thing.

We don’t like to think of it that way. We like to think of it as protecting our communities and our children.

We think of it as making sure that bad people are not among us. Not only is that a fool’s errand, because there are predators in every zip code; more than possible that there are predators in households where we don’t realize it.

There is drug use in every community, domestic and sexual abuse of children in every community, people who are living lives of quiet desperation that could drive them into an act that could land them in jail in every neighborhood.

Our attitudes about what we do in our communities, and a stubborn refusal to even have the conversation about what real rehabilitacion, reconciliation, and redemption could actually look like, is what drives the warehousing of one of the most vulnerable populations during this virus crisis.

We have been conditioned to not think of prisoners as fully human.

Not only do they lose their liberties for the time they are incarcerated, they never fully gain it back in the eyes of the society in which we live and collude.

So yes, I hope that one of the byproducts of this crisis is that we take a hard look alt who and how we incarcerate, but I do not have any illusions that taking a look and gaining knowledge is going to automatically move people to agitate for changing policy and looking to other countries best practices for more humane, and human, ways of bringing criminals into accountability, and later back into full communion with the communities they left.

Which means we have to be able to acknowledge that the current system is both flawed and intentional, and that the system will not as a matter of course be interrogated and challenged and critiqued and ultimately, hopefully, changed by those of us who are currently looking on in horror.

The prison system in the United States is a reflection of who we are as a people.

We cannot externalize and point fingers at others.

We need to begin taking a hard look at ourselves, not just those for whom we have contempt (both those whose positions and policies we superficially loathe as well as those currently imprisoned, but also for those who we feel are on the right side of politics and social policy.

We have to look at ourselves.

Yes, gain knowledge about not just what is happening right now during the current crisis but also inform yourself of the way it’s always been; the way incarceration has been a workaround for slavery and Jim Crow.

We need to take a look at what the intended and unintended consequences beget when we separate out a large portion of the population and what this means for competition for education, and status, and jobs.

And we need to look at how we buy into this tiered system– what we individually and collectively get from it, and ask ourselves not only if we have the knowledge, but also the capacity of compassion, volition, and agency to now decisively decide, individually and collectively, that it can no longer be as it is.

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