Building a Better Prison System
For three years in college, I went twice a week to the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution where I'd sit on the other side of Gary Pickle's cell door and chat with him through a little flap that a guard would open up for an hour or so. We talked about quite a range -- from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories to the time he shot a cop in the knee -- and I occasionally wonder what 17-year-old me was thinking.
You can't get to that cell door without an immense amount of getting to that cell door. The security checks and the other, larger security doors opening and closing at different rhythms and clangs. In some ways, it takes a great deal to get inside a prison, and there is much societal relief afforded to that concept: now that they're there, we don't have to worry about them being in our neighborhoods. "Tough on crime" is a DA/Sheriff/Judge-friendly campaign slogan that actually has quite severe repercussions.
I hate to toe a pessimistic line here, but the notion of comprehensive prison reform (I suppose you might even say the notion of comprehensive [anything] reform) in America is almost laughable. Health care is the closest thing to have taken recent root, but even that is being chipped away at. The progressive legislative agenda of LBJ's mid-60s "Great Society" (Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. -- the last time the Senate actually worked) is also under perpetual threat, both legislatively and judicially, and sometimes I wonder if Margaret Sanger would have been shocked to learn that even a hundred years after she opened the first Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn, white men in positions of great political import are asking the exact same questions, driven by the exact same misogynist compulsions with the exact same deleterious effects. This may sound like something of a disconnected leap, but it's precisely this world that makes me really love the idea of having daughters myself someday -- encouraging all their power and independence and might.
Anyway anyway. This podcast is about prison reform -- why the American system is god-awful (has everyone seen 13th yet?) and why there are model examples that actually do exist which are worth examining and borrowing from.
