Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelApproved
We need some kind of detention bill of rights. Right now, it seems we are holding them to basic human rights. We should have a higher standard for people who go through the system.
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This sounds hard to accomplish without a change in the perception of prisons and the people in them. One of the reasons conditions are so poor is that society thinks the prison population is fundamentally bad and needs to be punished. Why should we increase funding to better the health and education of the WORST people in our country? Let those rapists and murderers rot, who cares!
The first prisons in the US were established with a focus on trying to rehabilitate criminals, to transform their violent tendencies so they would come out as productive members of society again. There was a belief that prisoners could be redeemed. Unfortunately this belief waned in popularity once the methods put in place to rehab criminals proved ineffective, mostly because their cures for criminality were fucking stupid. At Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly in the early 1800s, solitary confinement was seen as a revolutionary treatment that would allow prisoners to reflect on their misdeeds and change their bad habits (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter...ntiary#History). They designed the building so that prisoners would almost never come into contact with each other. When it actually drove people out of their fucking minds, the people in charge didn't blame themselves, they blamed the criminal mind for being so depraved and beyond repair, and changed their mission from rehabilitating prisoners to punishing them.
Anyway, this is all to say I think an attempt to increase the conditions in prisons must be tied to a thorough re-examination of what exactly we want them to accomplish. Currently they house a large population that the rest of society doesn't want to deal with, a population that suffers from systemic problems like poverty, violence, racism, poor health, etc. Like others have said, addressing those problems head on is how we unravel the prison state.