Our expectations for prison

Our prison system does not provide a snapshot of crime in this country. It’s a snapshot of policies and practices that are a combination of politically expedient, profit-driven, racist, and absent of larger strategy or meaning—to say nothing of being divorced from actual crime rates.

Take a recent announcement by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections of a new policy that will ban book donations to prisons and stop delivering letters to prisoners. Letters will be sent to a company that will scan them and return them, where prisoners will get them in digital form. Donated books will no longer be allowed. These moves are an attempt to stop the flow of contraband, but illustrate a system with narrow, even inhumane solutions to complex problems.

Life without parole is a sentence that leaves no room for hope or for rehabilitation. The Abolitionist Law Project, in a recently released report, calls it “Death by Incarceration.” Many serving the sentence are elderly, decades older than the crimes they committed, and sick. But life without parole is just one area that requires reform.

What’s needed is an honest and comprehensive look, not at prisons per se, but at our values: What do we expect from prisons? Are we locking people up with the hope of rehabilitating them? Or are we warehousing the people who don’t fit into a whitewashed society?