We have convoluted and backwards notions of humanity. It’s a constantly shifting rating scale who is most worthy, and who we should leave in the dregs of a gutter somewhere. All the while we pretend as though we don’t encounter the ramifications of denying the humanity of others.
Kids that end up in therapeutic systems or juvenile justice are no different from kids that float along having a hard time without services.
I spent a short time doing clinical work in a juvenile justice facility. It was a modern building designed for its maximum security purpose. That translates to a place that actually looks and feels like a prison. Sterile and a little eerie. Other places where kids were incarcerated were like houses with barbed wire…not really all that different from the building structures of places where other at-risk kids resided. The barbed wire being the main difference. The types of kids found in each weren’t terribly different from each other either. If I had them mixed in a room together, it would be impossible to pick out any variation. I’ll even go as far to say that kids that end up in therapeutic systems or juvenile justice are no different from kids that float along having a hard time without services.
I don’t provide this information to say that the systems I’ve worked in were terrible places, rundown with apathetic employees. The cost isn’t so simple. The most well meaning people can do quite a bit of harm. We have a whole saying about our paths of good intentions, and where they lead.
The juvenile justice facility I worked in took a good deal of care with the residents there. So much creativity went into programming. The food was good. It was still a prison. Steel doors and cells. Movement restricted…so very mundane with what we do to people we don’t otherwise know what to do with.
My days blurred together after a while, and I had the luxury of going home at the end of each day and a two day break over the weekend.
My office was a converted cell in a wing left for staff. I had a window, but it was frosted glass, so I couldn’t see outside. It was small…white cinderblock walls. Pretty bare bones. I didn’t have a ton to do. My groups were after school, so it was a lot of boredom for much of the day. That was the hardest part. After a few months I could feel my skin crawl with a general itchiness. I could leave the building, but it was a process and where would I go? This place was in the middle of nowhere, as these structures tend to be. Incarceration requires land. I could walk to the school area, but what would I do once I got there? There was no one to talk to. Nothing new to see. My days blurred together after a while, and I had the luxury of going home at the end of each day and a two day break over the weekend.
The cost of losing freedom is greater than we realize. We could give incarcerated people every single luxury imaginable, and they would still suffer with the experience because losing freedom is a very big deal. It’s a big deal because people lose skills in a scarily small amount of time that are hard to gain back, especially if someone struggled with those skills to begin with. Almost everyone incarcerated returns to their communities in relatively short order, and what we as a society end up with are people who function worse than when they were first imprisoned. That’s a cost for everyone involved. I don’t even have to touch on our general safety. That lack of functioning touches everything even without considering recidivism.
I ran some groups one summer in a day treatment program. I met a seventeen-year-old who happened to have been incarcerated at that same facility. Their sentence was not long, maybe six-months. I never really brought up my prison work with kids. Sometimes it made sense, but not usually. I can’t remember why, but it ended up a topic in their group. This particular kiddo asked me what was harder, working with incarcerated kids or adults. I didn’t even have to think about it. Hands down it was working with the kids. I get some of the harm they can cause. I get the destruction. It’s not something to be minimized. But remembering how uncomfortable my own personal experience was, it’s just hard seeing kids go through it no matter what consequence they earned. That’s aside from the inherent bias in our various kid systems that disproportionately target certain demographics.
There is a cost to things. There is a cost to everything.
This almost adult at the ripe old age of soon-to-be-eighteen mentioned that at the end of their six months, they returned home and didn’t know how to dress themselves. They stared at the clothing in their closet and didn’t know what to do, what to choose. There is a cost to things. There is a cost to everything.
That kind of soft skill is called problem solving and it’s only one of the skills that’s lost with incarceration. We talk about teaching job readiness and whatever certifications one might earn while temporarily removed from society. I almost never hear of what our corrections system should do about soft skills, which are at the heart of basic functioning in such profound ways.
When one doesn’t know how to hold a basic conversation of small talk or move through life with the ability to order a sandwich, what does it say about our humanity and how we treat theirs? What does it say about the general trajectory of our society when there is a segment of our population that is essentially drowning in their freedom?
Even though all these people might have different needs, their commonality is that they aren’t seen.
It’s a constant balance between public safety and rehabilitating/supporting people that, as a whole, no one wants to think about. Mostly they are the addicts, the poor, the disabled, indigenous, and people in the LGBTQAI+ community. I don’t want to conflate that these groups are inherently worthy of residing in prisons, only to state that our criminal justice system disproportionately targets people in these groups. So, when we talk about race and prisons, we also need to discuss how race intersects with these other groups of people. Even though all these people might have different needs, their commonality is that they aren’t seen. There is a cost to that too.
At least seventy-five percent of the incarcerated possess some connection to substances. Some facilities have problems ridding themselves of substances within their walls, so it’s hit or miss whether someone can solidly move through recovery. But since they didn’t just end up in a prison with an addiction, what does it say about us as a society that we are completely indifferent to the problem of addiction until it directly applies to and impacts us? And even when we are touched by addiction in some way, there is no guarantee that we will care even then. What would happen to our addiction problem if we embraced the humanity of those individuals and took their struggles seriously? If an addict ends up incarcerated and we are relying on their primary treatment to be managed by a corrections system, then we are already scores of paces behind finding a solution that benefits everyone. There is a cost to supporting the capricious nature of recovery, but there is a greater cost to our current path.
What about the poor? What about the disabled? All of these groups can exist on their own or overlap in a complicated mess of what society won’t acknowledge. We turn ourselves away from seeing these marginalized people and pretend that the cost isn’t our prisons. After all, prisons are where people go when there is nowhere else for them. We go about our lives and ignore our part in masses of people left on the fringes of society, as though their humanity doesn’t exist…as though they don’t matter because we refuse to see them. Or worse, they are people to be pitied…or maybe a tool to congratulate ourselves for the charitable actions we might take.
What would be the cost to all of us to continue to ignore what’s in front of us?
What would be the cost of addressing our social ills before they bottom out in our corrections system? What would happen if we constructed a society where each human had an inherent value? What would it look like if disability weren’t a shameful mark on someone’s character? What would it say about our humanity if addiction were more than a burden that has the capacity to touch anyone without care or concern for our finances or social standing? What would be the cost to all of us to continue to ignore what’s in front of us? What’s the cost on others? What will it take for us not reaching the point of cost…where it’s enough for someone to be human, and therefore, worthy?
(Image description: close-up pile of US currency paper money of different denominations haphazardly on top of each other. Image credit: CNBC)
