Even after 10 months of writing a weekly blog about the abject failures of the American prison experiment, I am still unable to answer the ever-present question—
What do we do differently then, smarty-pants?
While this blog has offered my perspective on what prison does and doesn’t do for my son, I admit to dancing around the proverbial elephant in the room.
As a former mental health practitioner, I will also admit to my bias. I wholeheartedly believe that people can and do change, when provided conditions to do so. I am also guilty of spending many precious years of my life working toward massive system changes— in mental health, education, and yes, most recently in prison life.
As I became personally swept up in the churning, destructive currents of our criminal justice disaster, I was still adamant that someone, somewhere (probably a lawyer or a legislator or wealthy person) could ‘change’ our ineffective corrections models if only someone else would believe hard enough. I joined the groups, donated the money, waded through the daily email updates. Better programs. More funding. Support your corrections officers! Write your senator!
But— my bleeding heart is attached to a stubbornly rational brain. After decades of prison reform, we have only ever polished a turd.
In August, I wrote about a man named Troy Chapman1 who is currently serving 60-90 years in a Michigan prison for stabbing another man in a bar fight in 1984. He was 20 years old when that crime occurred, which makes him 61 today and 41 years into his prison sentence.
Since my post, he and I have begun corresponding. Oh— I know, I know. Talking with a convicted murderer is not a ‘normal' thing for most people but in fairness, I’ve never claimed to be normal. I’m even less so since my son went to prison. Troy is someone’s son too and like it or not, we are in this together. It also helps that he is a published author whom I have come to respect a great deal.
Through our chats and letters, I started to understand the limits of my desire for prison reform. During a phone call following my post about the struggle to define ‘justice,’ Troy started to explain his views on the purpose of prison. He unraveled several concepts that far surpass any thought I had given to the ‘What do we do differently’ question.
Troy hasn’t argued that prison is unfair nor positioned himself as a victim. Even after four decades in hell, he is not in favor of prison abolition— Troy believes that he alone earned his placement and that he was in desperate need of reorientation prior to and following his crime. That said, he also doesn’t love the fact that he has spent his entire adult life in a violent, seemingly purposeless place that keeps banging heads against the same damn walls while calling it rehabilitation. He would change it all, if he could.
But not by reform.
As Troy puts it, “The word reform legitimizes the current system. It’s like saying slavery needed ‘reform.’” The phrase prison reform implies that the system merely needs a coat of fresh paint or a plumbing upgrade. And while those things are nice, the foundation of our prison system is not only cracked, the basement is flooded and the entire structure is on the verge of collapse. Propping it up has become costly and futile.
Every year in the name of reform, lots of wonderful people working for dozens of thankless organizations volley for the same grant monies and limited space to implement the shiniest, newest evidence-based (capital P, capital I) Prison Initiative.
These hard-working groups shuffle in and out, their programs coming and going without much public notice or concern. Troy has watched this cycle— since I was seven years old. When the money dries up or prison staff complains too loudly, the good people for change are forced to pack up their booth and try again when the next political circus comes to town. Reform is 100% dependent on any given season’s political charades and clowning.
Worse still, us ‘free’ reformers think we have all of the good solutions. Justice and reform have traditionally been something that we do ‘to’ the immoral, bad guys. Justice has always dictated that those in need of rehabilitation have no say in the matter.
This is, however, slowly changing.
Earlier this year, President Trump appointed a formerly incarcerated man named Joshua Smith to the Bureau of Prisons— causing an uproar among corrections unions. He also named Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who spent 21 years in prison for drug offenses, to his cabinet in February. Even the current administration recognizes that it is a waste of our time to attempt any kind of lasting change in the world of crime or corrections without considering voices from inside. Frankly, no matter who you ask: the red people, the blue people, those who have stars or those who have none upon thars—
Our prison system is not working.
We spend over $2 billion a year as taxpayers only to see over two-thirds of our prisoners re-arrested within three years of their release. Over 95% of State prisoners are slated to come back to the community at some point in the future, and a full 46% of them will be reincarcerated within five years.2
While there is plenty of blame to assign for these figures (including onto individual bad actors), assigning blame misses the forest for the trees. No matter where we point the finger for the existence of crime, our prisons are not in the business of providing the service they’ve promised. Based on the above figures, they are currently operating at a 50% failure rate while taking over $2 billion of our hard-earned money each year for doing so.
I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure that is a negative return on investment.
While I say that we need to blow up the entire thing and start from scratch, Troy is more diplomatic. He says, “We don’t need reform, what we need is a [prison] replacement.”
“Having been on the receiving end of justice in Michigan, in the form of imprisonment since the early 1980s, I suppose I have a perspective on justice that’s different than yours, in many respects. When free citizens see someone carted off to prison, it often represents the end of a justice ‘episode.’ The credits roll and that’s that.
But for those of us carted off (and for our families) this represents the beginning— not the end. It commences our years of isolation and idleness, brutality and neglect, lost potential, self-protection, and shame. Prison itself doesn’t fix people nor make them new—
“When your son came to prison no one cared whether he was fit to be accountable. In fact, much of what the State did in the name of ‘holding him accountable’ has made him less responsible in the world.”
Bingo.
As an inmate, my son has been through years of fighting, petty bickering, solitary confinement, medical neglect, food insecurity, stalled programs, and a 16-month loss of contact with his family. He has not been offered education nor employment but instead been caged like a zoo animal.
Troy recently told me about another young man. During Covid, he shared a cell with a man in his early twenties who seemed hell-bent on bad decision making— in spite of sitting in prison.
“I used to look at him and think, ‘Man, you can’t be this stupid’ but ya know, over time I came to see that he really was that stupid. I say this knowing I was really stupid like that once too.
But this is what I mean about making people more able to be accountable while they’re here. We cannot hold a person responsible for things they can’t yet do. That, in and of itself, is unjust. Why do we repeatedly expect people who were never taught social skill or responsibility to suddenly become model citizens in the danger and disconnect that is a modern day prison?
One day, a C.O. who had written my young bunkie a ticket turned to me and said, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ I told the C.O. that we need to make him thirsty first. That young man only knows how to be forced to drink, so he won’t do it of his own volition until he has eaten lots of salt.
What if we made prison intake the beginning of a rigorous program that aided us in growing up? What if we were offered a way to try and repair the harm that we have caused others? What if we were encouraged to become the best versions of ourselves instead of the captured, defensive ones the current system demands in order for our survival? What if we started offenders on a path toward becoming accountable to society?”
During a follow-up email, he goes on:
“We can’t simply say, ‘I know what justice is and the rest of you guys are idiots.’ Justice cannot be defined coercively. It must be defined cooperatively.
There is a tribe in Africa called the Babemba. When someone in their group commits an offense, they bring the perpetrator to the center of the village and everyone gathers around him in a circle. This may sound like the African version of our justice process, but this is where the similarity ends. You see, every person in the group proceeds to tell the offender of every good deed he’s ever done for them, personally as well as in the context of community. Imagine the impact of this.
When I was hauled into the courtroom, every bad deed I’d ever done or been suspected of doing or even thought about doing (in addition to a few made-up ones) was aired with public outrage and disgust. The newspapers wrote of the scandal and the social outcast that was me. The point was impossible to miss: I was a despicable, deplorable thing that needed to be buried like toxic waste.
My Babemban counterparts must feel shame— just like I did. But there would have been a difference. My shame made me want to die. His, I think, might have made him want to live, and live better.
After the initial stage of community input (which can last days), the Babemba move into another part of the justice process: accountability and reparations. They present the offender with the practical harm of his actions and what needs to be done to set things right. In my case I was sent off to prison where my only real job was to suffer. This, it seems, is all society wanted (and still wants) from me.”
Is it?
Do we (the free and all-knowing people) just want suffering for suffering? Is that the end goal of American justice?
During my years as an embedded therapist in public schools, Restorative Circles started to be used as alternatives to suspension and expulsion. I have led these circles. I have trained educators in the who, what, how, and why we might do better to embrace a wayward kid than toss them out of the tribe.
What I will tell you from firsthand experience in ‘restorative justice’ is that it is only as effective as the mindset of the adults in the room. If they think it’s bullshit, it will be. If they find within themselves a belief that the kid can recover from a mistake and work to become a better version of themselves in the world— they will. Where the energy goes, the person grows.
The same will be true of any correction model that undertakes the challenge of replacing (not just tweaking) their obsolete and ineffective systems. Build more and tougher prisons, get more and tougher prisoners. Consider new ways of integrating accountability, maturity, and freedom in our corrections systems, and well— we just might find people correcting themselves.
Troy has spent 41 years watching programs come and go, without lasting impact. In his lifetime, the American incarceration rate has increased by 40% and recidivism has remained about the same. He has amassed a lifetime of observation while leading groups inside his institutions and writing books that address prisoner accountability and their place in our world.
Next week in Part Two of this series, we will unpack his concepts of a re-imagined prison— everything from how we classify inmates to what the grounds of a prison could be. We’ll take a look at two American prisons already implementing some drastic system replacements and discuss outcomes to gage their effectiveness. We will also hear some viewpoints from corrections staff (the other people inside) and continue answering that nagging question: What can we do differently?
In the meantime, please join in the comments or chat. Push-back, type in all caps, agree or disagree— but join the conversation.
Any cups of coffee you buy this week for us will go directly into Troy’s account to support his writing, his education, and his mentorship of others inside of a Michigan prison. If you would like to send him a word of encouragement, please comment below or DM me.
Bridget, thank you for this piece. It hit me hard. I was a U.S. Marine. I was also a cop. NYPD. And then I was an inmate. I spent 5 years in prison, and out of those years, almost three and a half were in solitary confinement. I went in believing, like so many do, that prison was supposed to rehabilitate, that it would “fix” me, teach me something, straighten me out. What I found instead was what you described: idleness, violence, shame, and a system that has no real interest in making people whole again. I am not rehabilitated. That word doesn’t even feel true. What I am is lucky. Lucky because I had certain things stacked in my favor, my background, my ability to read and write, and my stubbornness to not let the box kill me. But most of the men I was locked in with didn’t have those same advantages, and they got ground down into dust. Prison didn’t heal me or prepare me to re-enter the world. I did that work myself once I got out, and even then, it was uphill every step. The truth is, the system is designed to punish and contain, not to transform. And like you and Troy said, painting over a crumbling foundation doesn’t make the house livable. I appreciate you giving space to voices from the inside. Too often, people talk about us instead of with us. I’ll be following Part Two closely, because this is the conversation we need to keep having: not how to polish the system, but how to replace it with something that actually gives people a chance to live better. I’ll DM you again, we should talk sometime. You're an amazing writer, congrats on all of your writing!
Wonderful duet with Troy. Two great writers and two fiercely intelligent people going back and forth. Thank you for putting this out there Bridget. You’re a bright light in a dark culture that’s getting darker.