With this series we’ve shed some light
on the multi-billion dollar business of incarceration and the school-to-prison
pipeline that feeds it through discriminatory punishment. When discussing the
adverse effects of imprisonment, one aspect that is usually glanced over is the
effect on families and how these contribute to cyclical disenfranchisement.
In an article touching on an ex-prisoner’s reentry
to society, Cassel discusses the story of Elaine Bartlett, as told in the book,
Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. Her story is
one of a first-time drug offender, who made a “drop” in order to get some quick
cash to pay some bills and fund a family Thanksgiving party, and resulted with
a sentence of 16 years in prison. Cassel urges us to think about the damage to
a person’s agency that can come from years of not being able to make any
decisions, such as when to eat or when to go to sleep.
Now imagine this narrative. You’re a
mother of an infant and your husband has been convicted for selling drugs. His
minimum wage job wasn’t enough. Your minimum wage part-time job also isn’t
enough. It is part time because a full time job would require that you seek day
care services, which you cannot afford with your minimum wage even if you were
working more hours. Now that your husband is in jail you can’t afford to pay
your bills and provide for your baby. Your parents’ pension isn’t enough for anyone
either. You’re offered a single “drop” job. It should take care of the bills
you currently have pending. You consider the risk involved, but with so many
necessities you end up taking the offer. But as you soon come to know, the
dealer you worked for was under surveillance and it results in your arrest. You
won’t have a moment of privacy with your baby until he’s a teenager. The few
and short visits, closely monitored by correction officers, are deeply painful
to you and your child.
Now imagine going back to society,
you’re not eligible for a wide list of jobs, federal educational aid
(why you couldn’t study in prison), public housing, food stamps, and other
welfare benefits.
This story could be edited to match
hundreds of thousands of women’s realities. And because women’s rate of
imprisonment is expanding the most rapidly, hundreds of thousands of children
will grow up without their biological parents. Most mothers being incarcerated
are single mothers.
Is imprisonment a solution? The
lack of tolerance and compassion in the judicial system, schools, and in the
writing of legislation regarding punishment, does not help us move towards a
safer and more just society. It seems easy for government officials to only take
lobbyists’ special interests and people’s apathy into consideration when
implementing ineffective, divisive, and unimaginative methods of behavioral
surveillance and correction. This problem reaches new depth when one considers
the lack of second chances, and society’s inability to evaluate how greater
social constructs, institutions, and hierarchies cyclically places certain
populations in a pipeline that results in disenfranchisement. Who is at fault?
Society suggests that it is the individual’s choices that lead them to this
reality, and therefore, it is their problem. Meanwhile society is completely
dismissing the root of the problem. This is a collective issue; it is shaped by
the racial and class disparities that have been strategically acted upon since
the end of segregation, and that is inherent in our social
institutions.
By: Felix Acuña
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