ISLAND VOICES
Prevention, not prisons, the solution to crime
By Mike Coleman
Since President Richard Nixon launched the "War on Drugs" 30-odd years ago, one thousand prisons have been built and our prisoner population, fueled by the drug-related offenders who have dominated it from that day to this, has skyrocketed from 200,000 to more than 2 million.
There are 5.7 million Americans — one in 50 — on parole, probation or behind bars. The Land of the Free imprisons more of its citizens than any nation on Earth, and the long-term impact of this social holocaust has yet to be determined: there is no parallel for it in human history.
This justice increasingly takes aim at our children, sentencing ever younger kids to adult prisons for an ever wider range of offenses. We arrest 2.5 million children a year, and while you are reading this, 100,000 are serving time in an adult jail.
We are lulled along this path by a false sense of "public safety." "Tough on crime" politicians have campaigned on the theory that the more prisons they build, the safer you will be. But nothing could be farther from the truth: the statistics for recidivism prove that prisons flatly fail to achieve their purpose, that the only real result of treating humans like animals is to make them more animal-like. Scientists refer to it as cause and effect.
Even now, thousands of non-violent men, women and children are in prisons that only push them further from the civility you hope they learn there. They do not learn it when they are denied medical care or when their friends die for a lack of it.
They do not learn it when they sleep on floors with roaches, rats and sewage leaks. What they do learn is to hate the society that put them there without compassion for their developmental, emotional and even psychiatric disorders.
They will not be "corrected"; four out of five of them will return to prison. They will not be "deterred"; the average inmate has an eighth-grade education and cannot spell the word, much less grasp the concept.
They will not be rehabilitated by the dead, black steel of their dungeon-like existence. They will learn no respect for the "vengeance" of a society that is a study in political and financial corruption. Against impossible odds some do change, but the typical inmate will return to prison within two years for offenses that escalate, often in proportion to the length of his imprisonment.
Only one kind of human truly understands the dynamics shaping the rage within these tightly censored institutions: the inmate himself — and society has uncompromisingly discredited him. We do not believe him when he tells us he is mistreated, or we think he has it coming. We do not care when he files countless lawsuits against prisons that literally torture him. (In a recent United Nations vote for the reform of international prison torture conventions, the United States tried to defeat it.)
Sometimes, we do not hear him at all because he is buried in the back of some isolation unit, like the mentally ill inmates consigned to prisons that are increasingly the economic alternative to psychiatric wards. Although we no longer perform lobotomies or shock therapy on such men, they are routinely warehoused in prisons where they are locked down as management problems, solitarily confined for years to howl each night at the now inescapable demons that haunt them.
We read about "cruel and unusual punishments," like when Ulysses Kim was shackled hand and foot for weeks in the hole. We read about the endless suicides of men overwhelmed by the oppression of prison, like Lance Taylor, who bled to death because the prison doctor canceled two ambulance calls.
It may be hard to sympathize with violent men like Kim but he and others — and beloved island son Mackey Feary — were non-violent drug addicts serving short sentences. How many more beautiful voices, such as Mackey's, will we silence?
It is not just the inmates who are dying. There are the children we bury under every cell we construct and they are legion: more than the thousands in adult jails, younger than the 11-year-olds tried as adults. They are the crack babies of unrehabilitated addicts, the gamin heirs of fathers in jail and the orphans of victims murdered by the volcanic rage in an ex-con's gut. Those are innocent mothers and children dying in the streets of crime and addiction that we fuel with the revenge and hatred that mortars prison bricks.
Prisons kill as certainly as the triggerman does, scattering dead bodies like the detritus of a storm. As you read this, 2 million inmates are being bent down under the stifling heat of a hatred that sears and misshapes too many of them into projectiles of vengeful violence.
Protection? Society is under siege. Assaulted by prisoners that are fired out prison doors like the sprayed bullets of an assault rifle into a crowd of innocent bystanders.
By the Department of Public Safety, as it were.
In 1997 a 16-year-old was arrested for robbery, tried as an adult and sent to Halawa Correctional Facility, which then enjoyed the highest prison mortality rate in America.
He was sent to the maximum-security unit for intake, where the worst cons in the system live. I guess they wanted him to be "deterred" by the hardened types.
The only relief from hard time you get up there is an hour of recreation. Sometimes there is a guard for rec, but none was watching the day the orbit under the child's left eye was crushed by an inmate twice his size and age.
When his parents visited days later and raised a little hell, his head was cut from ear to ear across his scalp and his face was pulled off and reconstructed. He was granted parole shortly after his 18th birthday in the prison that changed his looks and his life forever. I wonder what he learned there.
The sooner we admit that the punitive — and economically crippling — model for prisons is a categorical failure, the sooner we can invest those wasted billions on better schools and outreach for our kids. Linda Lingle wants to build two 500-bed "treatment" prisons. We laud the emphasis on the addictions that fuel 80 percent of all crime, but we hope she wants to tear down 1,000 punitive beds and spend that money in the one way that renders even treatment less necessary.
The only meaningful solution to crime and addiction lies in prevention: a community-wide model for total outreach to at-risk children.
It is far less expensive than the price we pay for prisons that will disfigure them for life.
Mike Coleman is president of Like A Child. This is one of an occasional series of articles that looks at significant areas of risk for our youth and why high-risk children eventually end up in prisons.
