Better Homes and Gardens

The following is an excerpt from Part Two:

From nearly nine months of witnessing C/O abuse tactics, I could fill volumes about sadistic incidents. It would make Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment seem like a volume of children’s fairy tales. Limits to Pain summarizes precisely what my experience reveals:

“The receiving institutions do not like to be regarded, or to regard themselves, as ‘pain-inflicting’ institutions. Still, such a terminology would actually present a very precise message: punishment as administered by the penal law system is the conscious inflicting of pain.”

Textbooks might say that the goal of prisons is rehabilitation. That remains debatable. An attempt at such a lofty goal, within the current climate of supremacy, is doomed before the slightest benefit would be realized. In the 1976 electronic publication Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, the prologue by M. Sharon Smolick points out that the element of choice is eliminated:

“Until choice can be freely exercised and caring behavior encouraged, there can be no meaningful change and the rehabilitation of criminals will only be a system’s triumph over the values and behavior of the powerless in our society. Even a Better Homes and Gardens bedroom, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 20 years, is an intolerable prison.”

Add to that the unabashed repression of prisoners who inhabit the sinister institutions, by lethal ferocity of prison personnel. The result is nothing short of a living anguish. It is senseless and counterproductive. It simply does not accomplish the goal for which it is intended. Ms. Smolick further reinforces: “Reconciliation, not punishment, is a proper response to criminal acts. The present criminal (in)justice systems focus on someone to punish...”