From what I’ve seen, while prisons are better than jails, prisons suck.

Some people think prisons should suck.  That may be true, although I’m going to argue in a couple minutes here that they should not.  Even so, most prisons suck more than any reasonable person — that is, if they truly are reasonable — would agree that they “should.”

Now, whenever I write a post like this, I always have to start off somewhere near the top — like here — vainly trying to explain to borderline readers what I’m not saying.  In this post, for example, the sociopaths who have somehow managed to stay on the “right” side of the law — or at least to have managed not to get caught — will be gnashing their teeth at my statement that prisons “should not” suck.

I know that while I’m going to spend a minute here trying to clarify this, these people are still going to see me as some kind of bleeding-heart liberal who apparently thinks prisons should be super-sized country clubs complete with coddling, full-body massages, movie night (with popcorn!) and the like.

All I can do is assure you that I do not think that and try to assure anyone who actually thinks I’m a liberal that they just don’t know me.  Compared to large populations of Americans, I’m probably most closely aligned with liberals, although I personally think that can only be said because people who argue for limited government — the kind that can’t get into everyone’s business — are considered liberals by those who stop reading or hearing the announcement of the more-accurate label after the first two syllables.

Conservatives, of course, want greater governmental involvement in the lives of the citizenry.  As far as conservatives are concerned, governments should tell you who you can love, who you can marry, whether you can (or must) have children, how you can raise those children, what kinds of things you can read, see, or buy, with whom you can hang out, and so on.  Oh, and they believe that government should also pick one official god and stick with “him” and the official “he” the government picks must be “their” god and not someone else’s.  Anyone else belongs in Guantanamo, or in some super-duper-max prison.  Which is worse than a regular prison and reserved primarily for Muslims who escaped being sent to Guantanamo by virtue of being American citizens and not having engaged in any terrorist acts.

That we know of.

This description of conservatives is especially true of the ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives, who can’t even follow their own god’s admonition about being a light to the world and who insist instead on being the enforcers of the ancient laws explicated in the Tanakh.  Incidentally, these Pharisees don’t call it “Tanakh”; that’s for us god-damned liberal Jews.  To the right-wingers, it’s the “Old Testament.”

On the other hand, I have to be fair and indicate that I’m not really a “true” libertarian, either, because I do think some government regulation is necessary, even of corporations like British Petroleum (BP), as I argued on one of my personal blogs the other day.

Still, the smaller the government, the better.  It only needs to be large enough to protect us from being physically harmed by others, like rapists (which includes BP), murderers (which includes BP), thieves and destroyers of property (which includes BP) and similar types (almost all of which will probably include BP).

But I digress.  It was a necessary digression because I had to make sure to distinguish that I am not a bleeding heart liberal who thinks prisons should be cushy country clubs.

As I said, though, neither should prisons suck.  They especially should not suck unnecessarily.

Prisons should not suck for the simple reason that the prisoners held there are not all in it for life.  At least, not yet:  We still have quite a few laws on the books for which a life sentence has not yet been deemed appropriate.  Thus, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, many of those prisoners will be released back into society.

It is de rigeur these days to believe that recidivism is inevitable.  Criminals are immutable; they cannot change their evil ways.  I’m not sure how it is that conservatives believe that good people like — oh, pick just about any minister who turned out to be a seducer of young boys, or girls, or who took huge amounts of cash and spent it profligately on his own desires — how they think these people can change from good to evil and back to good again, but other people in our prisons can’t.

In any event, they’re wrong.  People can change.  They do change.  Furthermore, some people in prisons are there for committing crimes that they will never, ever repeat in their lives again, no matter what.  Some people make stupid mistakes in their lives and then — unless we help them — come to define themselves by their mistakes eternally (just like those who condemn them) and they become habitual life-long lawbreakers.  Without enough self-respect to recognize that a mistake doesn’t have to mark them for life, they will return to society, but cannot be reintegrated.  They will hurt, or steal, or otherwise transgress our laws, again.

And many of them will take that path because our prisons suck.

Prisons dehumanize people.  They start off being treated as animals by virtue of being locked up.  That aspect of it is unavoidable; it’s a consequence of the fact that we justifiably cannot tolerate the presence of people who will do what they’ve done and we must both remove them from our midst and punish them.

But we must also rehabilitate them.  Because, as I said, a large number of them will return to us.  We will benefit best if we can reintegrate them into our society, rather than encourage them to commit another crime, after which we will lock them up again. (If we don’t run out of space and money.)

The simple fact is that while our prisons suck, we cannot hope to accomplish this.  Prisons not only treat people like animals through locking them up, which I’ve already said is necessary and legitimate; they also treat them like animals in myriad other ways.  Guards abuse prisoners.  Routinely.  They mock them.  They steal from them.  They hassle them unnecessarily.  Sometimes they beat them, which is not part of any legitimate punishment sanctioned by our courts.

In addition, many of the procedures in prisons are excessively draconian and followed to the letter with an eye to inflicting the most pain.  Conversely, some of the procedures are arbitrary in their enforcement, or contain “loopholes” that allow guards to further abuse the prisoners, such as when a guard “pockets,” “trashes,” or otherwise “misplaces” what we in California refer to as a “602″: a complaint that should be processed through the informal administrative appellate process, before moving on to a formal administrative process and, potentially, to be the subject of a writ in a court of law.

And that doesn’t even get into the harmful things prisoners are allowed to do to one another.

None of this is conducive to rehabilitation.  Quite the contrary, it encourages exactly what we don’t want: a lack of trust in the idea that societal norms and rules have value and are worthy of a prisoner’s attention.   This is why, currently, prisons function more as schools, teaching those who have done badly how to do worse, or as factories, cranking out better criminals.

The safe enjoyment of the world in which we live requires that we lock up criminals.  But the safe enjoyment of the world in which we live also requires that we help prisoners to reform.

Unless and until the sociopaths who sanction, build and run the systems can be reformed, unless and until we as a society can let go of our belief that prison should suck, the reformation of prisoners is impossible.  We will only “harden” those we send there.

Making our prisons suck is inconsistent with our rehabilitative goals and inconsistent with American values.

We need to rethink not just our approach to crime (which I’ve often argued elsewhere), but our approach to imprisonment.  Yes, our goal should include the temporary or even permanent removal of people who have committed crimes from our midst.  But in reality, that is a sub-goal.

Our real goal — the only way to make us safer — has to be rehabilitation.

The direction we’re currently moving — making every crime subject to life in prison — is an unsustainable goal.

It is also inhuman.

The worst thing you can have is power and lack of knowledge. — psychologist Habsi Kaba.

Last Friday, I was privileged to attend the (Juvenile) Behavioral Health Court Quarterly Meeting in my county.  I was a little surprised to learn that I was the only private practice criminal defense lawyer to take advantage of this opportunity, but that’s a story for another blog article, another time.  Believing this to be a better alternative for some of my juvenile clients than repeated episodes of pointless incarceration which merely exacerbates their conditions, I wanted to learn more about how the behavioral court worked.

One of the first, saddest, and most difficult things I learned of concerns the struggle the Behavioral Health Court has just to survive.

The United States, but California in particular, has a penchant for punishment — no matter the costs.  Yet we recoil from rehabilitation, despite the savings, because “it costs too much.”

“I don’t care.  Lock ‘em up and throw away the key,” say many of my friends.  I was quite disturbed recently to learn that even one of my friends in the Public Defender’s office feels this way.

And it’s difficult to find an appropriate response, because (so far) none of the people I’ve run into who hold these views base their opinions on anything connected with the real world, or even logic.  The attitudes are emotionally driven, or based upon unexamined assumptions.

This is particularly troubling when it comes to juveniles — children — who come into contact with law enforcement.  As the most recent data shows, that amounts to around 80,000 children per day. According to that same article, as many as 80 percent — eighty-percent! — of these children suffer from a recognizable mental health disorder, while others estimate the number anywhere between 65 to 70 percent with diagnosable disorders.  Twenty-five percent have disorders so severe as to impact their ability to function.

No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of kids.

In most cases, because their mental illnesses are going undiagnosed, we’re essentially trying to get these kids to do what is physiologically impossible, and then punishing them when they fail to comply.  No small part of the problem is that many who should be helping these kids don’t understand the problem; they don’t see juvenile offender behavior as a mental health problem.

This is true, though, even for children who are not diagnosed with actual mental health issues.

“There’s been so much neurological research and outcome research into juveniles in the last 20 years that shows how powerful rehabilitation can be for a young person whose brain is still developing,” said Carol Chodroff, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. program in Washington, D.C. “People are starting to realize that it works, that it saves money and kids, and that’s why this bill is so important.” (Editorial, “Rehabilitating juvenile justice” (July 14, 2008) San Francisco Chronicle (online).)

The bottom line on that we need to remember the old cliche: “Our children are our future.”  All children. The costs of programs — like some kind of a “behavioral” court — to rehabilitate them, whether they are actually mentally ill or not, is significantly less than what we will spend otherwise, both monetarily and in terms of human suffering.