Opinion Sur
Incarcerating more and more is an endless process that is not equal to more security. Overcrowding and lack of control are the consequences. The imprisoned are also subjects of law and sooner or later will be back on the streets; ´if we treat them with violence, they will come out biting’. Already at the beginning of the XIX century there was talk about the failure of prisons, due to their incapacity to transform ‘criminals’ into citizens who abide by the law. In fact the deprivation of freedom never accomplished the goal of re-socializing offenders, for the simple reason that it is contradictory to expect someone to learn how to live freely when they are being deprived of freedom.
The failure of prisons are headlines still repeated today since little has changed nor is it foreseeable that will change in the medium term. Incarcerating more is an endless process that is not equal to more security; overcrowding and lack of control are the consequences.
We dedicate great efforts to develop a person with human and individual features in a context where circumstances sweep away human gestures, despises all that is individual and idiosyncratic. In a violent reality it is necessary to redeem individuality, reclaim the individual’s singularity, the value of personal space and experience the flexibility of a change of perspective that comes from appreciating reality as others see it, even from the ones we consider our enemies.
Integrating other visions to ours does not weaken our perspective about facts and processes, but enriches it instead. It forces us to see the complexity of desires, fears and illusions. Only then could we understand, as we have never understood before, that frightening set of people that is actually a group of terrified, tormented, desperate people who feel their own situation just as the rest of mortals. Seeing reality through ¨other people’s¨ eyes can release us from the tyranny of the single truth.
A fairer society reduces the sources of criminal activities; it does not eliminate them but generates strong positive impacts in human and material terms. To prevent is not all that needs to be done, but it is salvation for many. Prevention includes educating and employing; standing up to drugs, people and gun trafficking.
And what is there to say when the victims are imprisoned people who do not move us because we have diminished their human condition. However, whether we like it or not, inmates are also subjects of law and sooner or later they will be back on the streets; ¨if we treat them with violence, they will come out biting¨.
Facing people who commit crimes the reaction almost always begins and ends over-populating existing prisons or building new ones that reproduce the disgraceful conditions of the old ones.
To think that the Criminal Code solves delinquency by itself constitutes a dangerous reductionism because it avoids bringing up social responsibilities to solve complex problems; not only do we pull away from solutions but the prison demagogy adds new problems.
It hurts to admit that the criminal justice system is structured in such a way that it penalizes with loss of freedom any crime of the most excluded groups of the population; some have always asserted that there is where danger lies and that by locking people up ¨society is safe¨. How then can we explain the constant increase in the number of people under arrest, the overcrowding, prison as a school for aggravated crimes, reoccurrence?
Demagogic statements under the appearance of listening to social claims for security are easier to afford than working on the recovery of imprisoned ¨human beings¨, who –by the way- the great majority do not have paid jobs, have not passed the elementary level of education, do not participate in work training programs, one in four have been injured in prison and one in three have sometimes tried to escape: a behavior we could qualify as quite human, given the circumstances they are subject to.
Violence in and outside prisons express structural problems of our societies and speaks of the irrationality with which they are approached. But the one that cannot be irrational is the State since it is who guarantees the rights of all people.
To ease the pernicious effects of sentences that focus on deprivation of freedom, it is the State’s duty to provide sanitary and legal assistance to those detained, to support with work, education and in prison trade training so as to improve capacities and possibilities when the time comes to reintegrate to life in freedom.
When we dare get in touch with all the complexity of the life of those imprisoned and of our own life, when we recognize that we are not the only ones with history and experiences but others also have their own with injustices and their own suffering, when we learn to look into another’s reality to face without demonizing those who have committed crimes nor idealizing ourselves, if we actually got the contradictory voices to fully express themselves, in that moment the victims, “we and them¨, will stop being victims and prisoners but growers of better societies for all.
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Sociologist, El Agora
