The downside of TRADITION

There are probably some good things that come from traditional and accepted practices, but we should not be a slave to them. For example, some churches, through tradition, exclude women from certain executive or pastoral roles in the church. It is their loss. At one time, it was traditional to have black folks come to the back door of a business or to sit in the back of a public bus. There were even laws enforcing this tradition.

I believe that, as Americans, we have traditionally viewed politics as a game in which you denigrate the opposition for some small aspect of their position or their character. For example, John McCann’s call to vote against city council members and our mayor who supported a non-binding resolution in favor of equal treatment for gay couples. This tradition seems to ignore issues that are truly meaningful for citizens of a democracy. Of course, it requires more work on the part of the voter when you are asked to do a serious examination of the issues facing our government and to vote for people you hope can carry them out.

Our tradition of incarcerating men at levels unseen in other parts of the world is a problem. It’s a problem because this traditional approach isn’t working. It’s also traditional to pay no attention to what goes on inside our prison system. “If it is unpleasant place to be, so much the better” goes traditional thinking. I have watched “Prison Nation”, a series shown on the National Geographic Channel. A recent episode examined the high use of isolated confinement in our prison system. Some 70% of suicides in America’s prisons occur with inmates in isolated confinement (ICON). Estimates that 40-60% of inmates are mentally ill should add further caution to what we do to them. I wonder if the average mental illness level is higher at the time of admission or at the time of release from prison.

In the classic film, “Shawshank Redemption” which was set in the year 1947, in retaliation for a mild threat from the inmate to stop enabling the warden’s corruption, the warden puts him in ICON for 60 days. The comment is made that no one had ever been given that length of punishment at that prison as if this punishment bordered on the outrageous and inhumane.

Some may argue that ICON is the only practical solution to handling unmanageable inmates. I argue that it makes them more psychotic and more unmanageable and that it is not being properly managed to actually assure it is appropriate.

A young man who I mentored years ago grew up in McDougal Terrace. He won multiple trophy’s in Tae Kwan Do all over the southeast. He played basketball for me on a church team. He was a great kid, but this attention by my family, my church, and other mentors was not enough to overcome the abandonment by his father, a reading disability, the dire poverty he faced, and the lure of the street. He became associated with a street gang at age 15 and was involved in some significant crimes. Today, he resides in Lanesboro, one of the toughest prisons in NC. They offer no apology to me for locking him up for 13 straight months in ICON. I don’t recognize him. I don’t want to be around him now. In my view, the state of NC has destroyed him. He will be released sooner or later and he’s going to be a problem. In America, some inmates are released directly from ICON and put back on the streets when their sentences are completed.

The prison system has adopted countrywide a policy of isolated confinement for far too many inmates for far too long. It is a hidden scandal and a recipe for recidivism.

As a community volunteer, I took out an inmate recently who had been kept in ICON for 3 years. I looked at his record on the Dept of Correction website and he had been charged with one infraction since his incarceration (passing a message to a guy he was mentoring in AA who had transferred). It is a mystery as to why they administered this punishment to him.

The public can access names, photos, and criminal records, and infractions while in prison of incarcerated individuals, but can’t determine the punishment given for the infraction. I suppose it is “out of sight; out of mind”. I think they are shielding from the public the extent of the punishment and want to avoid questions being asked.

We don’t know about these things and to some extent the public doesn’t want to know. The US is internationally known for its strong Christian perspective. I wonder how this can be?

Some traditions should be scrapped.