(book version) (movie documentary)
This week's readings and documentary film hit close to home. Very close. My current internship site is Cook County Jail. I am working through CERMAK Health Services, an agency of Cook County Health and Hospital System (CCHHS) which provides health services at Cook County Jail. Cook County Jail houses about 9800 persons at a given time, and processes over 100,000 persons in a given year. They are the largest single-site jail in the United States. It is also the largest mental health care facility in the state of Illinois.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, among other things, changed the law from a rehabilitative system to a punitive system. This mandatory minimum sentencing caused a rapid rise in the incarceration rate of women over 400%. Most of the female patients I see during my art therapy sessions at the jail are being held not because of a violent crime, but because they did drugs.
Schlosser's (1998) article, "The Prison Industrial Complex" sums it up quite nicely:
Over the past twenty years the State of California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined.
But how does this account for race?
Statistically, over 50% of Cook County Jail is Black/African American and another est. 35% is Latino/Hispanic. At least 85% of the population is a racial or ethnic minority. Why? As Denbrough (1996) reflects, "I think of the crime that we middle-class Australians commit by allowing those who live in poverty to be criminalized and brutalized. I realize now that the use of prisons does not reduce violence but instead both creates it and moves it around so that it occurs behind prison walls, between working-class people" (pp. 114-115). Didn't Sir Thomas More say the same thing in his 1516 novel Utopia? Does this mean that for 500 years, we've come no closer to educating and reducing poverty that subjects its victims to being penalized for circumstances they were born into?
How are persons who never finished high school, thrown behind bars so that a permanent stigma remains, suppose to become productive members of society when the world they have been told to fight for has shown them no justice? What are we as art therapists suppose to do to help these people who are locked into a vicious cycle where it is profitable to keep them in the system so that jobs are created? Statistics show that rehabilitation, in-patient or out-patient treatment, is cheaper than housing them in jail.
In one of my groups, it was revealed that two inmates were aunt-niece. This led to a conversation about different inmates and their relatives that were also behind bars. What happens to the family that's left behind? It's becoming obvious.
I really appreciated reading your perspective and hearing your thoughts about the subject. I also appreciated hearing that you chose to work at Cook County because of your initial intimidation and I think that's really amazing. Prisons are set up to be these places where they keep all the bad criminals away but in reality they are still people, despite how they are portrayed.
ReplyDeleteI recently read a headline the other day about a woman being sentenced to five years in jail for sending her child to the wrong school (according to district). I think that pretty much sums up the corruption we talked about last week.