Editor’s note: This commentary is by Elayne Clift, who writes about women, culture and social issues from Saxtons River.
[W]e’ve all had a lot on our minds lately so I’m willing to bet few people knew about the prison labor strikes that took place in August across the country. That’s troubling since being in prison is a nightmare and getting worse. No matter what the crime, “prisoners understand they are being treated as animals,” as Jailhouse Lawyers Speak puts it. “Prisons in America are a war zone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead,” says the organization made up of incarcerated prisoners advocating for human rights.
I know about what happens in prisons from a primary source. For 20 years I’ve been corresponding with a wrongfully incarcerated woman who sleeps on a plastic pallet with a thin mattress in a cell shared with other women, some violent, who come and go. She cooks ramen noodles and other food in her cell to avoid high-carb, sometimes disgusting meals. She has no privacy, earns pennies for the work she does, is alert to danger. She is a model prisoner who received an associate’s degree while in jail, leads healing groups, and helps other prisoners win complaint cases, but parole keeps being denied. She tells me infuriating, sad stories about botched surgeries, medical malpractice, rape and other forms of violence.
That kind of thing is pervasive in prisons and it’s why the largest prison strike in U.S. history occurred in August, with inmates in over 14 states participating in work strikes, commissary boycotts, sit-ins, and hunger strikes calling for their humanity and rights to be recognized, while prison officials and guards did everything they could to suppress the dissent.
“The kind of rebellion demonstrated in these strikes increasingly appears justified,” James Kilgore wrote in a recent Truthout article https://truthout.org/authors/james-kilgore/ . Knowledge of prison abuse was heightened recently with the use of prisoners to fight the massive fires in California – for about 12 cents an hour. It’s only one example of the kind of “slave labor” prisoners endure.
Organizations of currently or formerly incarcerated people, including Just Leadership and the National Council of Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, have joined in the movement for prison reform. Solidarity is also coming from prisoners and advocates in other countries, perhaps most notably by a group of Palestinian political prisoners. Mainstream media is finally paying attention reporting on prison conditions and prisoner demands.
Along with prison reform comes the issue of capital punishment, highlighted by cases like that of Marcellus Williams, a black man who at this writing is scheduled to be executed in Missouri despite the fact that DNA evidence supports his innocence. Blacks are executed at a significantly disproportionate rate to their share of overall population.
So far this year 16 people have been executed by lethal injection in one of the 31 states that allow the death penalty. Since 1976 when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, there have been almost 1500 executions. That puts us right up there with China and Iran.
The thing is, the majority of Americans are against state sanctioned execution. Sixty percent of them don’t see it as a deterrent to murder, and 40 percent say it violates their moral beliefs. Even survivors of someone who was murdered are against capital punishment.
Some years ago, in an article I wrote about women in the forefront of the movement to abolish capital punishment, I said that botched executions, pharmaceutical companies refusing to provide drugs for use in executions, and an increasing number of exonerations had led to a growing awareness of the fatal flaws in the criminal justice system overall, and the inhumanity of state-sanctioned killing.
The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was troubled, in a case that came before him, by a condemned inmate whose case had gone on for more than 30 years. Similarly, a federal judge in California, at the same time, declared the state’s death penalty system to be “plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay,” violating the Eighth Amendment banning cruel and unusual punishment. The judge called California’s system “antithetical to any civilized notion of just punishment.”
Since the 1970s, DNA testing has resulted in hundreds of prisoners having their death row convictions overturned. Law enforcement officials ranging from police chiefs to county sheriffs have stated their opposition to capital punishment because it doesn’t act as a deterrent, whereas reducing drug problems and fostering an economic system that provides work, does. Others argue against the death penalty because it is more expensive than a life sentence. And religious leaders have opposed capital punishment because of their “belief in the sacredness of human life and in the human capacity for change,” as 1,000 of them wrote in an open letter to America.
In August, Nebraska executed a man named Carey Moore for a crime he committed in 1979. It was the first execution in that state in more than two decades. The German pharmaceutical company that makes one of the drugs used in the execution tried to stop the use of their product, to no avail.
Clearly, it’s time to revisit prison reform and capital punishment. Let’s hope a new administration will be humane enough to do that.
