Morality of prison

As I have written before we, as a country, seem to have lost our moral compass.  Slavery is our inchoate national sin, from which we still struggle for redemption.  Religion informs politics with debates about abortion and claims of religious discrimination; oddly, it does not with respect to political issues like gun deaths or immigration.

This incongruity exposes how knotted our values are and from whence our legal system is a confused product.

Opponents of abortion believe themselves to be messengers from God and protectors of the unborn; as clear a moral imperative as we have.  Life is more important than the will and health of the mother.  These moral firebrands want their government to reflect this value.  Banning (or restricting almost to extinction) abortion becomes a governmental act dictating what a woman can and cannot do with her own body and criminalizing medical care.

Yet, those who march triumphantly on behalf of the unborn often fail to picket state-sanctioned killing.  

If life is sacred why is there not (outside of the Catholic Church) the same energy opposing the death penalty?  

The same is true with respect to guns, 15,549 Americans were killed by guns last year.  This pales compared withthe 600,000 abortions performed in this country.  

Where is the moral outrage for senseless deaths linked to a specific mechanism?

Religious purists feel they are entitled to special rights (because of their religion) to stand outside of society.  

They demand the right to accost women as they approach a clinic, struggling with a decision about a life quickening in their womb.  Occasionally, we even find a misguided soul who interprets protecting the lives of the unborn as a missive justifying killing, maiming, or fire-bombing.

When it comes to same-sex marriage, they do not feel they should be forced to serve or employ someone who is gay.  

They ask for this right to discriminate from the  government and complain that our country is suffering from moral decay, when the personal rights of others are given higher priority over religious values.  

This chooses government to pick a side; when this happens, evil ensues.

Circling back to the original sin of slavery, it was not too long ago (1932) that our government (the U.S. Public Health Service) was using 672 African-American male sharecroppers in a misinformed clinical study about the affects of untreated syphilis.  

These muted guinea pigs were infected with this horrible disease and, then, for 40 years never given the cure (penicillin), informed about it, and just  told they had “bad blood.”  

Such a study would never have even been conceived of on poor white sharecroppers.

As noted, though with the death penalty, our criminal justice system is not imbued with much in terms of moral values.  We decide that if you commit a crime society deems serious enough, you will be incarcerated.

There is little thought in the morality of those decisions, as emotion and politics often drives both individual sentencing decisions and statutory sentencing constructs.  Fine.  

But, the road through the criminal justice system does not end with a sentence, as it includes the penal system.  

Our nation’s correctional history is pocketed with some horror stories.  

Brutal chain gangs, particularly in the South, only faded away in the middle of the last century.  Mandatory prison sentences in the 1970s transformed our existing prison structures into overcrowded human rights disasters.

Today, prison directors are asked to do more with less, as budgets are cut to the bone and an aging prison population (concentrated collection of the most diseased Americans) have exploded healthcare costs.  

The results are less professional prison staff and increasingly dehumanizing conditions.  New York is closing Riker’s Island over the next decade because doing so is cheaper and more efficient than trying to clean up the endemic cesspool it has become.  

To “solve” budget crunches state and federal officials wash their hands by contracting with private entities to provide correction and detention services.  Magically, government prison budgets being crushed are supposed to be transformed into profits in the private market.  Absurd, government is not that wasteful in performing traditional governmental functions.

What we end up with are immigration detention centers forcing detainees to perform almost all operational functions to keep them open at slave labor.  That’s right, private agencies rake in profits from government contracts built on the backs of the detainees themself keeping operational costs at a minimum.  This was supposed to have been outlawed by the 13th Amendment.  There are five (5) lawsuits pending trying to reverse this ancient practice – three (3) judges have already ruled such practices unconstitutional.  The business model is so dependent on “slavery,” these private detention centers may end up shuttered by these lawsuits.

Private prisons suffer from a different flaw.  Because they are contracting with governments at a per prison cost-rate, the amount of money they can spend on personnel and infrastructure has to be reduced.  This leads to fewer guards, lax supervision, poor medical care, and crumbling buildings.  In a Federal lawsuit, the East Mississippi Correctional Facility has been exposed as a hellish “Lord of the Flies” cesspool, with inmates dying from prisoner-on-prisoner abuse, callous indifference, and squalor.

Abortion is a hot button issue, as it should be, about our country’s values.  But, morality runs deeper.  It also runs deeper than the legality of same sex marriage and the ability to punish dissenters.  Morality is about how we treat each other.  When it comes to private prisons, morals are forsaken for saving a few public tax dollars and no one seems to much care.  With the death penalty, public satisfaction has greater value than morality.  When it comes to guns, morality is a missing subject of the debate.  Maybe we need more “morality.”

Warner Robins attorney Jim Rockefeller is the former Chief Assistant District Attorney for Houston County, and a former Assistant State Attorney in Miami.  Owner of Rockefeller Law Center, Jim has been in private practice since 2000. E-mail your comments or confidential legal questions to jim@rockefellerlawcenter.com

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