Who Are Prison’s Real Victims? Hint: It’s Not Just Inmates

The first time my son met his father was in the visiting room of Rikers Island. After throwing my purse, cell phone, and other belongings—including my six-week-old infant’s formula—into a locker, I stripped off my coat, emptied my pockets, and walked through a metal detector.

Between the hype over Orange is the New Black, Matt Taibbi’s best-selling book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, the Obama administration’s new clemency guidelines for nonviolent drug offenders, and Oklahoma’s recent botched execution, prison, it seems, is a hot topic.

Everyone from D.C. politicians to TV pundits is down to discuss stop-and-frisk, the prison-industrial complex, the death penalty, and cracking down on crime. Yet we avoid talking about the system’s collateral damage: families.

While corporations may be people, inmates—and by extension their families—are not.

Inside Rikers’ reception area, visitors—friends, partners, parents, siblings, and children—officially register and wait for a seat on a bus that drops them off at one of the prison’s 10 jails. After being deposited at the proper facility, visitors are then asked to reregister and wait again until their number is called. Once called, they undergo an even more rigorous search. That search includes removing one’s shoes and socks, and, if you’re a woman, a bra pat-down (and shakeout) before being led upstairs to wait for the detainee to be produced. The ordeal takes all day.

Rikers, which Mother Jones called one of the 10 worst prisons in America, isn’t known for its hospitality. The entire process happens under the watchful, and often disdainful, eye of correction officers. When they’re in a good mood, C.O.s merely sneer at visitors. I’ve also seen them berate visitors—swearing at and verbally degrading them—as if they’re the ones accused of a crime.

The warehousing of Americans, often black and brown men, has been justified by those touting the need for greater anti-crime measures, but as Taibbi points out in The Divide, crime is actually down.

“At its peak in 1991, according to FBI data, there were 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people,” he writes. But “by 2010 that number had plunged to 425 crimes per 100,000, a drop of more than 44 percent.” Despite that drop, “In 1991 there were about one million Americans behind bars. By 2012 the number was over 2.2 million, a more than 100 percent increase.”

“Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization,” Taibbi writes. “There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.”

Discriminatory practices like stop-and-frisk are commonplace around the country. Poverty is criminalized through policies that call for random searches. Drug testing of welfare recipients is also continually suggested by politicians. These strategies boil down to one thing: incarcerating people of color and then stripping away the humanity of their family.

It’s a painful reality I’ve experienced over and over again.

My son’s father has since been transferred around New York state. The visitation process has been repeated at every prison I’ve visited.

At Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, N.Y., I was forced to remove my bra altogether before walking through the body scan. At Attica the C.O. ran his gloved hands (which he also used to check visitors’ shoes) through my son’s diapers looking for contraband. On multiple occasions I’ve had my hands “randomly” tested for drug residue. Small items, which were listed as permissible, have been trashed by disgruntled C.O.s. Many times I’ve watched other people’s visits be terminated when they didn’t move as quickly or as gleefully as the officer wanted.

Most prisons have switched from being “penitentiaries,” geared to punishment and revenge, to “correctional facilities” that claim to be built on reform. The result is the same. Everyone stuck in the system—prisoners and family members—is viewed with suspicion and written off as unworthy of respect. It’s prison—it’s not supposed to be “easy,” right?

Here’s the thing: Strong family support and connection has been proven to lower recidivism rates. But jails choose to make it incredibly difficult for families to stay in contact with their loved ones. Pricey phone calls, hostile visiting environments, and the location of prisons—they are often tucked away in rural parts of a state and often support entire local economies—don’t facilitate adequate family support.

With the average prison sentence just 28 months long, most inmates return home. Most (76 percent) also re-offend within five years of being released. This can be attributed to the difficulty of getting a job as a felon, and to facilities’ refusing to fund educational programs, adequate drug counseling, comprehensive mental health services, or job training programs. Somehow, though, there’s always money for expanding capacity and hiring staff.

As we continue to have conversations on crime and prison, let’s not forget those innocent children who are, through no fault of their own, tarnished with the stain of criminality. Though it may be easy to write off inmates as deserving whatever foul treatment the state can dole out, remember that these men and women will soon be home and in your neighborhood. Perhaps then their issues will be impossible to ignore.