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Colorado obviously has prison trouble. Inmates rioted at Ordway last week, and there were stabbings in Buena Vista. Facilities exceed capacity already, and the overcrowding will get worse as the public clamors for longer sentences and the legislature responds.
No matter how many new prisons are built, though, prisons will always be a hot political issue. We spend a lot of money on prisons. It doesn't seem to do any good, and it probably never will.
Consider other things the state spends money on. We can define a successful school -- its graduates possess certain skills. Or a successful highway -- you can get from here to there safely with little delay. But how do you define a successful prison?
What are prisons supposed to do? I can think of four things: deter, punish, rehabilitate and isolate.
Deterrence means that we know prisons are awful places. Thus we obey the law, because otherwise we might go to prison.
I've only been inside a prison once. In 1986, I wrote an article for Muse, the state arts magazine, about the controversial sculpture at Old Max in Cañon City. Mark McGoff, the warden, was quite helpful. He stayed with me as I went inside and interviewed inmates and guards.
The warden was at my side, so the visit shouldn't have bothered me. But when those steel doors clang shut behind you for the second or third time, and the fetid institutional smell overwhelms, and the pent-up anger and hostility becomes almost palpable -- I still have nightmares about it.
If a prison is that horrible for an hour or two, what must it be like for a 10-year sentence? Or for those who go in there to work every day for 40 years?
I don't ever want to enter another prison, for any reason. But not everybody thinks the way I do, and there are reasonable arguments in favor of prison, as opposed to sleeping under bridges.
Each prisoner gets about $12,500 a year spent on him. Only 40 percent of Colorado's residents have a higher per capita income; a lot of Coloradans would eat better and get better medical care by breaking the law than by obeying it. Prisoners may be the failures of society, but we spend much more on them than we do on our presumed future successes, college students.
So much for deterrence. And if prison is no worse, and likely better, than what many people had before, a sentence is certainly no punishment.
Rehabilitation is another conspicuous failure. If a prisoner is rehabilitated, he becomes a productive member of society, and he doesn't go back to prison. But about two-thirds of our prisoners do return.
As for those who don't return, any prison sentence is a
life sentence because the prison time is always on one's
record. Serving one's sentence does not pay one's debt
to society.
Society never lets an ex-con pay in full,
no matter how hard a former inmate works to make something
of himself.
A recent illustration is Clarke Watson's request for a pardon. He got into trouble during his youth and served his time. He's certainly made something of himself since then. But that isn't enough to make an ex-con totally respectable and rehabilitated, so he's applying for a pardon. He shouldn't need to.
It is tempting to think that prisons succeed at isolation -- that they isolate dangerous elements from society, at least for a few years. But does this isolation of 4,000 convicted Coloradans make any neighborhoods any safer? Does it protect convenience store clerks from terror? Do we really feel secure from crime?
Prisons really aren't isolated. Regular people work in them; a lot of my neighbors have jobs at the Buena Vista Correctional Facility. They're tense and worried because the place is overcrowded. It wasn't designed for the violent offenders now serving time there. It's a bomb waiting to explode, and it won't be just prisoners that get hurt.
Maybe we should resurrect public stocks and the dunking stool for minor offenses, and exile felons to penal colonies. Anything would have to be an improvement on this correctional system that fails at everything it's supposed to do.
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