The English Department at Rogue Community College recently changed the curriculum for the writing course I have taught for years. I could have said, “Good time to retire,” and avoided the work of developing a new course, but I was intrigued and challenged by the new curriculum, which requires all students in the class to write about the same issue.
I thought about doing food issues (important, but not that important) or climate change (difficult) or drug abuse (too easy), but mostly I thought about over-incarceration, which I consider one of the biggest shames of this country. While I was still considering issues, I attended a political-interest gathering about climate change at a beautiful big house in the Applegate. As the hosts were walking me to my car after the event, they said, “This was so successful. We should have another such gathering on another topic.”
“Oh, yes,” I said enthusiastically. “We could do one on prison issues.”
The topic did not sit well with these well-to-do people. They drew back, as though it were slightly lethal, as though prisoners were unsavory people and the topic distasteful. I decided immediately to do it. The need to understand the wrongs of our prison system seemed paramount.
It is my theory that prison issues touch us all, so I started asking people, “Do you know anyone who is or has been in prison?” The answer was frequently yes, and those who answered “no” would say, a bit later, “Oh, wait. There is the son of my employee” or “Now that I think about it, my ex-
husband’s cousin was in prison.” The only time I got an unqualified “no” was when I asked that question in class. But the three or four students who said no were young. My guess is that in a few years’ time they would say yes — unless we change things fast.
The class was a success. The students chose good topics: treatment of the imprisoned mentally ill, policies for imprisoned pregnant women, capital punishment, treatment from guards, prison violence, mandatory minimum sentencing, solitary confinement, sentencing for juveniles. My questions were more broad: What should prisons be for? How can we reverse the sky-rocketing trend of incarceration? Are we putting the wrong people in prison? Are prisons obsolete, as Angela Y. Davis puts it? Should we just abolish the system altogether? Can we at least stop making humiliation and dehumanization a part of the prison experience? Can we at least stop using prison as a means of controlling certain races and of punishing the poor?
As a part of the course I had a panel of four ex-prisoners address my class. They had served in three different prisons, both state and federal, and had been incarcerated for various crimes: embezzlement and identity theft, negligent homicide with a DUI, car theft (and lots of drug-related jail time), and eco-terrorism (arson and conspiracy with a terrorism enhancement). All four ex-prisoners were grateful for the opportunity to talk about prisons. The students asked a lot about rehabilitation. Two panelists said that prison had given them a chance to get their lives straightened out. For a while the discussion seemed to indicate that therefore prison was a good place to be. That, I felt, was a false impression – it’s not that we should send people to prison to get them on the right path but that those people should not be sent to prison in the first place. They might have needed the programs they got there, but they didn’t need to be there.
Bastøy is an island prison in Norway with beaches, good fishing, horse-back riding, postcard views, a sauna, and tennis courts, all accessible to the prisoners, men serving time for crimes that include murder, rape, and trafficking heroin. (Only prisoners with a commitment to living crime-free on the outside world can get a transfer to Bastøy.) The prisoners live in cheerful cottages or in a big, white, college-dorm-style mansion. Art adorns the walls and grounds. Prisoners eat well. They have all the freedoms of people in society except that they are not allowed to leave the island. To see a picture of a prisoner sun-bathing at his leisure on a porch overlooking the sea is shocking to us, but maybe we should let the facts speak. Those who leave Bastøy leave as responsible citizens. The reoffending rate is 16%. In the US it is 51.8%. The crime level in the US is 87% higher than in Norway. Whether or not we want to say that Bastøy-style prisons are a good idea, we can certainly admit that something in Norway is going right and something here in the United States is going very, very wrong.
Diana Coogle’s new book Living With All My Senses: 25 Years of Life on the Mountain is available from Laughing Dog Press, Applegate, OR 97530.
