Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 3, 1993 TAG: 9304050235
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN MANNING
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
VIRGINIA PRISONS DON'T REHABILITATE, AND SOCIETY PAYS THE PRICE
AS AN INSTITUTION, our correctional and penal system is an abject failure. Conditions in prisons and jails across Virginia virtually ensure psychological impairment and physical deterioration for thousands of men and women each year.Rehabilitation and reformation is the rhetoric, and systematic dehumanization is the reality. Public attention is directed only sporadically toward the subhuman conditions that prevail in these institutions, and usually only because the inmates themselves have risked many more years in confinement to dramatize their true situation by any form of protest.
Most prison officials continue to believe that rehabilitation is achieved only when the inmates accept without question the authoritarian structure and policies of the institution. Rehabilitation should be spoken of in terms of opportunity for education and training, not in terms of thought control or institutional conformity.
Virginia's politicians and taxpayers must wake up and realize that a vast majority of prison inmates will eventually return to society with the attitudes learned from their prison experiences. Any solution for increasing public safety must address the future behavior of today's criminals.
This is the most massive prison-population explosion ever experienced, not only in Virginia but all over the United States. The current rate of increase of more than 10 percent per year represents a prison-space demand of about 1,000 new beds per week, far in excess of new ones being supplied.
Prisons were built with the idea of reformation. The penitentiary was intended to serve as a place for reflection in solitude, leading to repentance and redemption. But these prisons served in reality only to punish mentally and physically.
Prison conditions suffer in part because of the horrendous overcrowding which has developed in the past decade and is continuing. This is a direct result of excessive reliance on the use of imprisonment as a sanction, with very little correlation to crime rates. Not all Virginia's inmates are incorrigible. It would be a lot easier to justify the enormous cost of its lock-'em-away strategy if it was working, but it's not.
One of the central vices of prison life is the enforced idleness that inmates must endure. Few Virginia prisons provide meaningful rehabilitation opportunities. In most prisons, psychiatric and psychological counseling are nonexistent, and educational programs and vocational training are outdated and inadequate. Shortchanging these programs is not the answer, by far.
The gap between the rhetoric of corrections (rehabilitation, education, training and treatment) and the reality of prison life (idleness, solitude, despair and dehumanization) grows with each passing year.
The basic purpose of prisons should be rehabilitation of those sent there by law-abiding society. Virginia politicians should consider what's necessary for rehabilitation in the imprisonment of criminal offenders. Too much taxpayer money and administrative effort is needlessly consumed by outdated policies and structures.
Virginia corrections officials must realize that too many of these policy structures are based on doctrines from the 1940s. The department must become the engine of reform, growth and hope for the future, and it must serve as a beacon of promise for the potential of mankind.
The absence of affirmative programs of training and rehabilitation may have constitutional significance, and militate against reform and rehabilitation. Any inmate required to live in these conditions stands no chance of leaving one of these institutions with a more positive and constructive attitude than the one he or she brought in.
Conditions in Virginia's prisons create an environment in which it is almost impossible for prisoners to rehabilitate themselves. For those inclined to do so, or to preserve skills and constructive attitudes already possessed, the environment makes dehabilitation inevitable.
Clearly, Virginia must embrace bold programs. Good programs are expensive and produce only mixed results. But they have been shown to cut dramatically the rates of returning to crime. Self-improvement programs should be the most important thing happening in prisons, and what happens there affects society as a whole.
While the state government has thus far declined to elevate a positive rehabilitation program to the level of a constitutional right of the inmates, it is clear that a penal system cannot be operated in a manner that impedes an inmate's ability to attempt rehabilitation or to avoid physical, mental or social deterioration.
The Department of Corrections should create a wide variety of meaningful work, education and vocational programs. Instead, prison conditions are so debilitating that they necessarily deprive inmates of a decent opportunity to rehabilitate themselves.
Virginia politicians and corrections officials must have a sharper perception of how all these actions could be meshed together to help preserve the structure of our society. Their about-face to the problems of the correctional system only create more. Responsible people must work together for a solution. It would be nice to be able to change the genetic structure of man so that crime of any nature would become an impossible act, but we cannot rely on that for many years. We must do something today!
If Virginia's reform intentions were real, we would see proof of the liberal fanatasy that prisons can reform and rehabilitate. The state's lax approach to fighting crime has made it somewhat of an accomplice to all criminal elements. Studies show that prisons actually help create future crime, since many ex-cons are released lacking any intervention and commit more crimes after their release from the "correctional system."
Virginia has been reluctant to address these important issues, or even step forward and suggest what the problem may actually be. There should be a constitutional obligation to provide adequate treatment and rehabilitation programs for inmates. If politicians would develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world-class citizens, they are fulfilling the first requirement of restoring sanity in our time.
Kevin Manning of Roanoke is serving 16 years at Brunswick Correctional Center for grand larceny involving a check-cashing scheme.