by Lacino Hamilton at Macomb Correctional Facility
The last few years I have written many articles attempting to diagnose the deep malaise within the American criminal justice system. In particular, the human costs of high walls, razor wire, locked doors, grossly restricted mobility, punishment-violence, and execution–prison’s defining characteristics.
I have also attempted to expose and explain how over time the community was forced to give up its right and power to help its members when harmed by conflict, crime, or just crises in general. Policies and practices which have transformed communities into passive observers of the totalitarianism of the state and a clique of private companies.
Such policies and practices are dressed in the iconography and language of justice, but can hardly be called fair or restorative. They are in effect acts of war for they attack and eliminate the indigenous processes and agency of families and neighbors. I am witnessing this in real time with prison officials’ self-serving self-reporting on response to COVID-19. Despite a few gestures toward CDC recommendations of social distancing and wearing mask, prison officials remain commited to one objective above all others: absolute domination.
Prison officials are releasing daily COVID-19 updates to the press, but the public should not trust they are truthful or factually accurate. First, none who are completely independent of the state and its particular interests are allowed to enter prisons and witness for themselves why most incarcerated citizens are living in a constant state of fear of falling ill and dieing from the virus.
Second, why does the MDOC have the only say? What member of the media has interviewed incarcerated citizens with COVID-19 for a first-hand account? What member of the media has pushed back on claims that a major contributor of COVID-19 related deaths is the result of incarcerated citizens failing to seek medical attention? What member of the media has toured the hallways and gyms where incarcerated citizens are suffering from COVID-19 without medical attention from an actual doctor? The distance between self-reporting and the facts is reflected in the culture.
The horrific global coronavirus pandemic is revealing flaws in our current state-sponsored capitalist system, hollowness in the private health insurance system, actual strength of the economy, the true scale of “preexisting conditions,” and shortcomings in basic social protections. It is also making common cause across race, class, occupation, religious denomination, city and state lines. The virus is pulling the covers off the American socioeconomic system, and the most basic test of the legitimacy of government: the ability to protect its own population.
What the virus is revealing is lending moral authority to denounce decades of unrelenting privatization at the hands of the oligarch-serving Republican and Democratic political parties. Moral authority to denounce the absurdity of an employer based health insurance system where tens of million of people are without health insurance and many more with inadequate insurance. And lending common sense to denounce the position that liveable wages, food, housing, health care, and education are not human rights.
Unfortunaty, because of the enormous barrier of state sponsored reporting on what is taking place in prison right now the covers are not being pulled far enough back to expose the life and death plight of incarcerated citizens. A population of 2.3 million. A population that reflects the stark differences between rich and poor, tyranny and justice, racism, the use of victims against other victims, lack of resources to speak out, and endless reforms that change nothing.
Incarcerated citizens is a population expected to passively comply to the demands of prison officials, expected to passively accept severely repressed and restricted acts of daily living, including the elimination of critical thinking and individual decision making. A population deprived of access to education, vocational training and transformative programming. A population largely invisible to the general public.
There are valiant attempts to break through this manufactured invisibleness. Courageous incarcerated men and women who, amid an environment whose brutality demands concentration on their own safety, are concerned for the rights and safety of others. Men and women who have began making connections between the personal and the socioeconomic system. Many of whom are punished severely for daring to foster a dialogue among all stakeholders.
There are also equally courageous and valiant attempts by alternative media to supply information ignored by mainstream media. Attempts to be “a voice of the voiceless.” But open lines of communication between us on the inside and the general public still do not exist, and they should. Prison having the only say as to what is or is not taking place behind locked doors cannot help but give license to shamelessly distort the truth.
