We all laugh at wealthy, white college students breaking the law in obscene ways – think movies like “Animal House” and “Neighbors,” with scenes of underage drunken antics, hazing, abuse of illegal drugs and sex offenses.
But when it comes to how we treat different demographics actually convicted of these crimes, we deplore them.
Two weeks ago, a nationwide prisoner protest broke out in response to overpopulation, poor safety standards and questionable prison labor practices. In California, about 300 inmates took part in hunger strikes to shed light onto these stark issues. These peaceful protests call to the forefront the principles of America that are denied to these millions behind bars nationwide – the right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
If Strathmore Drive and Gayley Avenue, or fraternity row at any other colleges across America for that matter, were policed the way Baltimore or East Los Angeles are, then our national dialogue on this issue would be monumentally different.
This is not a call to arrest every fraternity member who has had a beer. This is a call to realize the common humanity and call for equality of human rights between all facets of society, including prisoners.
And at UCLA, students who advocate for human rights must acknowledge the humanity and rights of all facets of society, including the imprisoned. We need to vote for candidates who actively want to change the harm done to impoverished minority communities due to disproportionate levying of justice.
Overpopulation in prisons unfortunately is not a new story in the state of California. In 2009 the Supreme Court mandated the state to reach a population percent of 137.5 percent of the maximum capacity.
There are currently 2.2 million inmates nationwide. This endemic overpopulation has kept prisoners from receiving proper medical care and protection from inner-prison violence – the latter of which follows rampant growth of gangs that takes place in state penitentiaries. In Maryland and Mississippi, prison gang violence has resulted in unchecked violence, and the slew of human rights violations faced by prisoners in these conditions is deplorable.
On top of that, the current system simply doesn’t deter crime. The inhumane treatment in the punitive system has serious effects on inmates’ psyches, as demonstrated by the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. The lasting psychological effects of prisons in combination with poverty and a lack of support networks have caused the recidivism rate within three years of release to be around 65 percent. With rates this high, it is evident the system is failing at rehabilitating these citizens to be reintroduced into society. Not only that, drug offenders released typically turn towards violent crime after release.
Californians have set an example for the rest of the nation in terms of prison reform by acquitting and shortening sentences of nonviolent drug offenders. Now, California voters need to keep pushing their state assembly members and senators to pass drug and immigration reform legislation to address the clear human rights issues facing overcrowded prisons and to abandon the emotionally charged and fact-challenged law and order rhetoric.
Prisoners are expected to work as part of their “debt to society,” with labor ranging from physical manufacturing projects to more specialized work. In exchange for this labor, inmates are paid anywhere between 40 cents to about $1 per hour. These earnings are used for supplies and to communicate with those outside the prisons. However, prisons exploit their monopoly over these markets by charging their inmates phone rates close to $14 a minute. In other words, the United States prison system forces all able-bodied inmates to participate in backbreaking labor at abhorrent pay rates and then makes them spend it back just to connect with their friends and family – effectively jeopardizing their sanity and morale.
Even in the most extreme cases involving crimes such as rape and murder, the basic principles of human rights must be acknowledged and unwavering. For each one of those outliers, we cannot forget about the hundreds of thousands of inmates with families, who made nonviolent mistakes or got caught up in the wrong crowd due to the burdens of their socio-economic circumstances. And factually speaking, this attraction towards revenge has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually and has ruined the lives of numerous incarcerated individuals and their families.
We do not need to look abroad to China, Saudi Arabia or Russia to find human rights violations and a failed system for enforcing blind justice. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women locked in overcrowded, under-resourced prisons for nonviolent crimes, while their children grow up without a parent and their marketability in today’s tight job market becomes nil.
Most UCLA students may not be directly affected by what happens in the prison system. But it is undeniable that we all break the law, whether it is in what we take into our bodies to study, relax or party, or torrent and download off the web.
If it were not for your parents’ wealth, being a gifted student, the color of your skin or where you were born, you wouldn’t be so different from a majority of your brothers and sisters in America’s cages.