Prison Reform and High School Discipline

Making the switch to public school in 10th grade, I entered a world where the only punishment for wrongs was some form of wasting time (detention, suspension, etc). Whatever the student had done, they were told to sit in a room for an hour after school or to take a couple days off. Basically, because the student had annoyed and inconvenienced the teachers, the teachers would now annoy and inconvenience the student. Some teachers saw it as a way to set their students straight, and others used it as a socially-accepted form of revenge. Whatever the motive, the student was made to suffer through an hour of wasted time (arguably after having already endured six or seven hours of wasted time), and there was little encouragement for productivity. The philosophy of this punishment was determent. The student knows the consequences, so they won’t want to get in trouble. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well, and it had a lot of the same problems as the modern day prison system.

When I was in middle school, I attended a small private Christian school that I’ve only just realized had a profound disciplinary system. Here, we were not given detention for our wrongs. We were given restitution. If we had been  caught sticking gum under a desk, we were told to stay after school, but the time would be spent productively, cleaning the gum off the bottoms of all the desks. If someone had written on the bathroom wall, they were given a bucket of soapy water and a scrubber to clean the graffiti off the stalls, and if that didn’t work, they were given a bucket of paint and a brush. In a sense, we were treated like adults and trusted with responsibility, a lesson more valuable than most of what went on in the classrooms.

Now I doubt this school had any idea that their system was so insightful or that it has such potential for other institutions. They were simply following the ancient Judeo-Christian ideal of penance. If you screw something up, then it’s not only your responsibility to apologize and ask forgiveness, but also to go fix it and make up for the damages.

Some see this system as barbaric, but I would argue that it could be seen as revolutionary. Imagine a judicial system in this country where criminals were given opportunities to make up for their wrongs, rather than waste time in a cell. If our true aim were to help people learn how to live in society, why would we punish them by taking them out of that society? It’s the same old problem going on with school detentions. The goal is just to get the trouble-makers out of our sight so we don’t have to deal with them. In fact, we’re so good at it that there are currently 2.3 million people wasting time in American prisons.

Instead of adding to these ridiculously high numbers, I propose we find a more productive way to deal with our criminals. Send thieves to farming communities where they can learn to provide for themselves and contribute to society, working in cooperation with others. Many criminals would probably prefer this lifestyle anyway but have never been given the opportunity for it, having been oppressed so deep into poverty and despair that theft was the only visible option for feeding their families. If citizens have sown violence, then teach them to sow peace. Don’t just lock them away as if to say they are lost and hopeless.

The major flaw in my plan is that in order for it to work, it requires a loving authority. Our middle school teachers genuinely cared about us, and that is why they took the time to teach us a better way to live instead of taking the easy way out and just forcing us to sit in the corner. And while I make this statement without much verification, I imagine it would be difficult to find law officials who would fit the same description. We would need not just a changed system, but a completely refreshed system, with new people running everything with a new attitude. I wonder if it would be possible to find enough of the right kind of people in this country.

And even more important would be for us as a society to make our own penance, to go and change all the failed systems that lead so many into crime. That is the real challenge here. To create a world where we can admit our mistakes and try to fix our damaging models of ecomoics, education, and more.

A musing from the pipe. Also: beavers

(as in a pipedream, not illicit drug use… “illicit”)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions walks a fine line between absurd humor and scathing commentary, for in between the crude drawings of assholes and the discussions of “wide-open beavers,” there lies a blatant satire of politics and society (of course, the wide-open beaver sections can be considered part of that).  I often find myself boisterously guffawing one moment and pondering the truths of his statements the next.   Example (don’t worry about the names and such if you are unfamiliar with this book):

She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off the tremendous doctors’ and hospital bills her father had run up in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything.

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick.  Patty Keene’s father’s sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

Now do me a favor and forget politics and economics and all that for a moment:  does this make any sense?  Should being sick cost more than a luxurious trip to Hawaii (never mind ten times more than a handful of those trips)?

Okay, now you can consider economics, but try to do it in a different way.  Maybe this wouldn’t fit into our economic model, or any model that could be derived from our current one,  but I think that means that there needs to be a huge change in the way our society views things, because it just doesn’t make any sense at all.

You don’t have to be a communist to think that everybody deserves to “enjoy” certain accommodations and privileges, and I don’t understand how good health isn’t one of the most basic of those.

And now for another quote from the book that is completely unrelated.  It’s self explanatory.

It was somehow decided that wide-open beavers, which were ten thousand times as common as real beavers, should be the most massively defended secret under law.