Earlier this month, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Colette S. Peters to serve as Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Many eyes will now be on the troubled agency and what is happening behind bars under new leadership
Rightfully so, given years of dangerous conditions, abuse, corruption and mismanagement at the BOP.
Editor’s Note: A week after Peter’s appointment, outgoing BOP Director Michael Carvajal was subpoenaed to testify before a Senate committee examining abuse and corruption in the federal agency.
But it’s not enough for only those who oversee prisons and jails to understand —and be held responsible for— the conditions of confinement we subject people to in America.
What is just as important is for the people who involved in the decision about whether someone should go to prison and jail, and for how long, to see firsthand what they subject people to when they advocate for incarceration.
That would be prosecutors and district attorneys.
Every day, prosecutors across the country assume the immense responsibility of asking courts to take away people’s freedom and separate them from family and loved ones. Yet, many prosecutors have never stepped foot in the jails and prisons these individuals are sent to, or in any correctional facility at all.
We physically separate people inside prison walls, making it easier to separate them in our minds as well.
Addressing the implications of mass incarceration requires actually seeing the individuals behind the files, cases and statistics that make up our criminal legal system.
Visiting these facilities and talking to people who are there breaks down walls of separation and creates the opportunity for understanding human beings and human struggles not so different from our own.
This recognition led 65 elected prosecutors this month to pledge to personally visit the prison, jail, and juvenile facilities in which individuals prosecuted by their offices are detained, and to require prosecutors in their offices to do the same.
This pledge, organized by Fair and Just Prosecution, is part of the #VisitAPrison challenge launched by Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).
We need to see firsthand the many ways that incarceration can actually worsen a person’s circumstances, rather than rehabilitate them. Prosecutors cannot fully understand this – or recognize how alternative responses in community settings can at times be a better approach – when they have never seen up close the conditions people are subject to inside our nation’s prisons and jails.
It’s not hard to miss when you visit a correctional facility how the carceral starting point that epitomizes the American criminal legal system can inhibit rehabilitation and successful return to the community.
People are not just stripped of their freedom, but of their very humanity.
People behind bars receive woefully inadequate medical and mental health care.
Some 40 percent of people in state prisons currently have a chronic disease, yet, correctional facilities regularly employ medical staff who are not qualified or who have had disciplinary issues.
Mental health care is no better.
In state prisons, 56 percent of people have a recent or past mental health problem, but just one in four report receiving professional help in prison even though conditions of confinement can bring on or exacerbate existing challenges.
Many (including young people) are placed in solitary confinement that exacerbates trauma and can cause lasting physical and psychological harm. Between 55,000 and 62,500 individuals were estimated to be in solitary confinement for at least 22 hours per day for an average of 15 days or more as of 2019.
Nearly 3,000 of them had been in restrictive housing for over three years.
Even when not physically separating people behind bars from each other, facilities are increasingly adding barriers that isolate people who are incarcerated from their loved ones, despite decades of evidence showing that maintaining connections can lower recidivism rates.
States are limiting or eliminating paper mail, and families spend $1 billion a year to talk with relatives who are incarcerated, with costs as high as $5.70 for a 15-minute phone call. These barriers to connection create added and unnecessary punishment.
It’s not surprising, given these often inhumane conditions, that America’s jails and prisons are dangerous. In 2018, correctional administrators reported nearly 28,000 allegations of sexual victimization in their facilities.
Exposure to violence in prisons and jails can be traumatizing and negatively impact people’s physical and emotional health. From 2000 to 2019, 10,742 people died of suicide in prisons and jails; over 5,000 of them were never convicted of a crime.
Improving conditions for those who do need to be behind bars is not simply the right thing to do, it will also keep our communities safer in the long run.
According to federal data, of those released from state prison in 2012, over 70 percent were arrested again within five years, and rearrest rates were higher for those who were serving time for non-violent offenses.
Perhaps if more prosecutors understood the inhumane and dangerous conditions of jails and prisons – and invested in understanding the people living in these facilities – they would think twice about alternatives before asking to send human beings to these facilities, removing them from supports in their community.
We urge more elected prosecutors – and all elected officials – to join the #VisitAPrison pledge and open their eyes to the harsh consequences of mass incarceration. And we urge them to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way.
There is a better way that can keep communities safe while treating every individual with the dignity they deserve. All of us benefit from that more humane starting point.
Mark Gonzalez is the district attorney of Nueces County, Texas. Stephanie Morales is the commonwealth’s attorney in Portsmouth, Va. Miriam Aroni Krinsky is the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution and a former federal prosecutor.