Could we (should we) learn more about prisons from CV19?

[Dave2002]

I don't have a problem with prisons being places where people are kept to safeguard the rest of society. I don't believe that every person is essentially "good" - whatever that is, and can be reformed. However, it does seem to me that being locked up in a very small space for an extended period is really unpleasant - and some of us are obviously finding that after only a few weeks. We personally don't have a major problem - we live in what is now quite a large house, with a fair sized garden. Other people are nothing like so fortunate.

So a few questions come to mind.

1. Can prisoners tell us something about how to live in very confined spaces for very extended periods of time? How to survive, how to avoid going crazy, etc.?

2. Should we re-evaluate the punishment aspect of prisons? Is that what they're really for? A significant proportion of the UK prison population are there for drug related offences. Countries, such as Canada, have changed the rules on drugs, and the prison population there has dropped. Should "tough sentencing" really make even a "short" prison sentence a stretch of four years?

[Serial_Apologist]

As one who was "raised" in a highly racist family, many years ago one of the TV networks put on a series of programmes in which a western couple (or it may have been just one individual) stayed for several months with a so-called "primitive" tribe in Borneo, I think it was. I am eternally grateful for this programme as having marked one of a series of enlightening stages in my growing up, in which I was thankfully divested of racist views and feelings in myself. But my main reason for mentioning this here is that one thing that was made readily apparent during the course of watching that series was that criminals are made, not born. Maybe a Rousseauian view of people - and following the Buddha my response to imminent personal threat is not to refuse my attacker's arrest until I have all the details about him - but a little reflection makes it clear that criminality is our kind of society-in-denial's way of targetting and then dumping the psychological consequences of its unprojected and unresolved contradictions and conflicts onto certain easily identifiable individuals for purposes of scapegoating - much the way unreconstructed people can't bond outside "their own" group, and RD Laing's dysfunctional familes need a member to be made mad - or the way in which the Western world literally dumps the consequences of its unsustainable lifestyles onto Third World countries.

I'm sure there are many things some people confined to solitary in prison could tell us, but survey after survey shows the most materialistic societies to be groundings of eternal dissatisfaction, and unless we use sharp intellectual tools to weed out what it is about the things we are led to believe make for a happy or at least contented world in the first place, asking others who have resorted to crime for answers is no different from a man inflicting domestic cruelty on his family and then asking them what it was like.

[MrGongGong]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

[Serial_Apologist]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-for-15-months

Thanks for that - I hadn't come across that actual story before. Actually it bears out my view of "human nature" rather more than I would have found the arguments to back it up.

[MrGongGong]

Thanks for that - I hadn't come across that actual story before. Actually it bears out my view of "human nature" rather more than I would have found the arguments to back it up.

The book it is taken from is shortly to be published in the UK

It bears out my experience much more than the narrative of people being fundamentally selfish and lacking in empathy.
It's not hard to work out where much of the idea of "human nature" being destructive comes from

[Serial_Apologist]

The book it is taken from is shortly to be published in the UK

It bears out my experience much more than the narrative of people being fundamentally selfish and lacking in empathy.
It's not hard to work out where much of the idea of "human nature" being destructive comes from

Yes, absolutely. I've long believed various interlocking systems, both material and ideological, to be at play in the making of obedient citizens - some of them going back a very long way have made quite a comeback, flying in the face of "revealed truths" or " evidenced reality" as it's probably more accurate to call it.

[Dave2002]

... asking others who have resorted to crime for answers is no different from a man inflicting domestic cruelty on his family and then asking them what it was like.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say here. I have been into prisons and met prisoners, though they were presumably at the low end of the threat level. Just because they have committed offences doesn't necessarily mean that their views are not of interest.

Some people do have a very curious relationship with prison. For example, some people deliberately commit crimes around holiday times - such as Christmas, as they have learned that they can cope with prison, and they will at least get fed at Christmas. I have heard this from magistrates - and in one case story I heard about, the magistrate would have been content to impose a fine - but the accused person preferred to go to prison for the reasons I have suggested.