I beat the crap out of a tenant of mine that shoved my seventy-five year old mother. I ended up doing almost two years as a result. So as someone who has been in the system let me tell you a few things I observed.

One thing I observed is that close to 30% of the people behind bars were there for stealing (from burglary to armed robbery) to obtain money to feed their drug habit or had resorted to dealing to pay for their drugs.

These people were not able to obtain any medical assistance for substance abuse prior to being incarcerated and the drug programs that were offered in the jails were a joke, not because the people involved did not care but because they were underfunded and understaffed. Rehabilitation is not a priority in the system so a large number of these people will get our and end up getting on drugs and reoffending again because they do not have any kind of support group to assist them.

By that I mean that when they get out they are left mostly with no means of support, they have no family structure that they can call upon to assist and being that they have a criminal record they are locked out of any jobs that would enable them to earn a living wage.

One person that came in to the jail while I was there was a guy who I worked for at a political activist group several years before. He had a master’s degree in environmental science & had a very good job within the organization. I did not recognize him at first; he had to identify himself to me. I asked him what had happened and he said; “Do you remember when I first came to Philadelphia?” “Yes” I answered. “Well, someone introduced me to this guy named heroin and he has been kicking my ass ever since”

So, about 30% of the people were there for drugs.

Additionally about 25% of the people who were there were mentally ill. They were fine as long as they took their medication but when they did not they were really of the wall. Now remember, out of jail there are no programs (or just not enough) to assist them in ensuring they both take their medications or to even enabling them to obtain their medications. Contrary to popular belief Medicare and Medicaid do not pay for 100% of the cost for medication. In Pennsylvania the co-pay is $4.00 now that does not sound like much but please take into consideration that many of these people need five or more drugs to keep them stable and the drugs do not work forever, they begin to lose there effectiveness over time as you build up a tolerance for them. That is also another leading cause of them becoming unstable and ending up in jail as it gets them before they are even aware of it.

That accounts for over 50% of the total number of people in jail; Drug addicts and the mentally ill.

They need to be in hospitals, not jails! They need help not punishment.

Now, let’s move on to the remaining people. A large number of people in jail are illiterate. I spent many an hour reading letters to people that they received from family and loved ones; I also spent many an hour writing letters for them. Those people are doomed to a life of crime as they cannot get any kind of job and being uneducated is not a qualification for assistance under the current welfare system. The jails offer almost no education programs for people in jail, contrary to the information heard about jail house diplomas. Remember a large percentage of the people who are illiterate have high school diplomas.

If we spent more time and energy on ensuring a good education for people then we could spend less on jails. The people I have mentioned here account for about 10% of the people in jail.

That leaves about 35% of the total jail population left from my first hand observations. Of that remaining 35% about half of them need to be kept in cages! The remaining 17% can be split into two additional groups.

5% are innocent people falsely accused and wrongly convicted and the remaining 12% are the group I feel into, we did it, we are not likely to do it again and we are here to take our punishment for poor judgment.

So let’s see
30% drug addicts
25% mentally ill
10% unemployable
5% innocent

Now remember this is just what my personal first hand observations were from inside of the jail over a period of just under two years, not a scientific study conducted by mathematicians and psychologist in a lab.

So only three of ten people who are in jail should be!

That is to me a disgrace to my country. That we, the wealthiest country on earth would allow such a thing to be; that we would rather lock someone up for $30,000 a year rather than spend $7,000 to educate them.

That we would incarcerate the mentally ill and then toss them back into the street and not provide them with the needed support to allow them to live normal productive lives.

That we would not make sure that people who had made a bad decision (drugs) had a real opportunity to attempt to escape the monster of drug addiction.

Does the prison system need a new direction? Oh yea, very much so! Not to be soft on crime but to be very very hard on it... to reduce it and to make it unacceptable in our society! The current system breeds more crime and that needs to be stopped and it could be stopped for less money than it is costing us to create more crime under the current system!



Now before you know-it-alls go on your rants about these people & their standings as human begins, let me remind you that we have all at one time or another made a bad decision that could have destroyed our lives if we had been caught.

 

 

No, I did not see much of this, the one example I did see was food preparation. All the food was placed into the containers by inmates (F.Y.I the reason he was taliking about food is because someone said on the post that Coporations hire Inmates for Jobs). Unlike you see in the movies the food trays are very small and the typical diet is only 1,400 calories a day.. That is the minimum required by international law for feeding to prisoners. It is a slow starvation diet. The prisoners make up for this by buying commissary goods, like candy bars. Now the cost works like this you get paid (I should mention that this varies from jail to jail) fifty cents for your eight hours work and a candy bar cost seventy-five (I am going back five years).

I should also clarify that this was a county jail not a state prison and the prisoners who were there from the state prisons (for trials and various other hearings) all said how it was so much better upstate.

I had it easy in the jail as one of the Lieutenants who ran a wing of the jail was a client of mine in the outside world. In less than one week I was in a cell (as opposed to the rooms that house eight people in a space that is 15 x 15 there were two of us in a space that was 7 x 12) the usual wait is thirty days.

I immediately was given one of the cushiest jobs in the jail (the receiving room, where all incoming prisoners are processed). I got preferential treatment across the board. Almost every day a guard would bring me a salad from the officer’s mess hall and one of the deputy wardens gave me unlimited access to her coffee maker for fresh coffee and to a small room where I was able to watch TV for an hour alone. She also let me read her newspaper during that time. In addition to that one of the sergeants was running for the position of union local president and having had considerable experience in the field he recruited me to put together a campaign program for him.
This status kept many of the prisoners who would have attempted to exploit me (as they did others) from even saying boo to me out of fear that they would get their heads bashed in. It also kept the few and I do emphasize few, guards who were on power trips from messing with me as well.

Being white and with most of the guards as well as the prisoners being black and Hispanic I was in a very small minority. In one pod (eight pods make a block) there are 80 prisoners.

The breakdown was like this 5 white people 1 Asian 20 Hispanic. 54 black this was in Philadelphia.

For the most part racism was not a real big issue, unlike the state level. Don’t get me wrong it was an issue but it was one where the boundaries were easy to break down.
The real difficulty was between the Muslims and the rest of us. I am not going to go into depth about that here at the moment except to say that when the Muslims met for prayer on Fridays we would take a guess at how many people would get stabbed and how long it would be before we were placed in lock down for the rest of the night. (The record was about twenty minutes, so that would mean it was about five minutes into their service).

Also I think I should mention the prison staff. Most of the staff were highly professional and performed their jobs exceptionally well. The “bad guard” was most certainly the exception there. The real problems were in the upper levels where politics came into play.