| Only once in the Stop Family Violence’s two-plus pages of statistics did the text refer to perpetrators by gender. Finally near the end of the article “…in his lifetime” referred to the masculinity of a serial killer. I’m deeply grateful to be able to access information and statistics, but oft times, I’m left with more questions than answers:
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Razor wire, federal prison |
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Old House of Correction sign |
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Prison behind our house |
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Supermax cell |
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Jailhouse walk, Seattle |
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Fatherless child |
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Glassy scream |
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Barefoot in chains |
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Why are we hiding, down-playing, disguising the fact that almost all criminals are males—males without hopes of rehab as penal institutions once strove to provide on tax dollars?
Today however, prisoners are the whores of the profitable pimping penal system, while the women and families left behind suffer immeasurably. Caged at taxpayer expense, the family provider must be augmented in the home, if there is one.
He receives room and board for free while she struggles to keep her children and perhaps aging parents alive. Most everything else an inmate needs or wants must be purchased at penal commissaries, and again, the family in waiting must send funds to his inmate account for luxuries such as paper for writing and paper for wiping. (Women even have to buy their own ‘little mattresses.’) Shoes have to be purchased in some zoos.
Undoubtedly, fairly convicted criminals should be removed from further harm to society. They seem, however, to take a long and circuitous route to their final ‘address.’ That means more criminal justice jobs, red tape, and delays—milking the systems to the fullest extent of (and perhaps beyond) the law. How do these tenets equate to caged for profit tenants?
Who gave the penal institutions permission or instructions to forego rehabilitation? Re-education or vocational training? Psychological counseling? Instead, “inside” has become almost freedomless in every way—even protection from unwarranted abuse from personnel. That, too, must be bought or sought in trade.
Recent television sagas and documentaries have shown what prison life is really like—bigger, meaner, and more ‘sophisticated’ ganglands within the brick and barbed wire compounds of the creeping criminal ‘class rooms.’
One would think that low recidivism rates would earn a penal institution’s funding, but then that would be too easy to monitor. And the fewer prisoners, the less funding to manipulate. Ho, hum. The Good Old Boys ride again.
In contrast, the small percentages of female prisoners just wither away, rather than thrive, as their male counterparts. Not that anyone seems to care. But here again, gender differences are rarely taken into serious consideration—rather both are treated the same. Cages, for men, are at least known boundaries; whereas women in confinement wilt without nature’s daily companionship.
Somewhere between the two accepted gender forms is the castigated hell suffered by homosexuals and others who are ‘less than’ the brutish alpha male role models we pay to idolize on cable TV. Since they’re out of bounds in the gender game, they have to pay the sacrificial penalty.
The political and civic hype we inhale, which tries to convince us that multi-billion dollar, high-tech facilities are needed, good for the community (retailers), and keeps us safe, is just more smoke screen to hide the profitable corruption within.
Meanwhile, Mom probably had to move to a lower rent district (if there is one), which would obviously entail changing schools or childcare, relocating doctors for perhaps three generations of patients, transportation to work concerns, and frantically stretching the one-income family’s devaluing American dollar—even though she probably works two jobs. And men wonder why women are crabby.
The darker side of criminal legislation and incarceration is that the governments (city, county, state, federal) are making rules that release men from their contractual and familial responsibilities and place them in the penal systems’ numbers rackets. There’s only one other gender (already at the brink of the global governmental abyss) to take up the slack of her missing partner.
Millions of taxpayer dollars could be saved by ‘outsourcing’ non-violent criminals back to their homes, assuming they were newly equipped with the skills of coping, surviving, and bettering their circumstances, as well as their fatherless children’s.
According to recent news flashes, some politicians want to jail violators of immigration laws rather than returning them to their home country. Does anyone hear the sounds of cash registers? How soon will there be a ‘justice center’ in your neighborhood? On your tax statement? Making headlines?
The reasonableness of it all just doesn’t add up—but the dollars do. And so do the tears of the women and children behind the invisible bars of the Good Old Boys’ penile system.
© 2007 Lynne Sims
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