The New Yorker: To What Ends Incarceration?

Great article in the New Yorker regarding America’s prisons and the sense of “timeless time” that pervades:

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

Read it all.  If you’ve ever been in a pound and known that a few dozen furry eyes are staring at you begging to be sprung from the joint, that’s close to the feeling expressed here…

It does make one wonder whether our prisons (or more inaptly named “penitentiaries”) really are serving a purpose?  What good does it do to warehouse 6 million Americans to no ostensible purpose?

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