Humane Sequestration

This piece is a sequel to Get Thee Gone, my essay on capital punishment. What, then, of the exponential majority of people who commit crimes, even horrendous crimes, for whom execution should not or will not be enacted or even considered? I am only considering the United States system here—references to the “Norway Model” are used to discuss if such a system can be implemented in the USA.

An individual does something wrong, so we imprison them. Of course, with that statement, we immediately confront the question of what is right and what is wrong、and who defines it. So, let us amend my statement: we imprison people who do something illegal, that which is considered wrong, even evil, by the majority of people. Because they have done something illegal, that same majority of people believes that, in some way, they must be punished. Yet we have a constitutional right against “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, how do we titrate punishment so that it is not “cruel?”

For many people, being placed in the most luxurious of circumstances, yet at the same time to be separated from one’s family, to lose one’s home, to never see their pet again, or to lose the affection of one’s children as they grow up and away would be experienced as painful beyond measure. Is it cruel? Is there any sanction whatsoever that some, perhaps most, would not experience as cruel? “Unusual,” by the way, was not meant by the framers of the constitution to mean “rare” or “infrequent;” it meant something cruelly innovative, departing from long-accepted usage, and intended to cause suffering. For example, adding a twenty-four-hour low-frequency drone tone to an audio-feed in an inmate’s cell, or wall-to-wall televisions playing the best hits of Baby-Shark on an endless loop would be unusual by this definition. But is it not awful to be housed with a malodorous, aggressive, intimidating person; to suffer sleep deprivation due to an inmate in another cell, mentally ill, or perhaps, just an asshole, howling the night long; to be forced by a prison gang to get one’s family to smuggle in contraband. None of these are unusual in the least, but are they not cruel?

A further problem occurs when those who have custodial responsibility for the prisoners are assumed, at least by some of the public, to be responsible for punishment, much like medieval executioners or torturers, even though this is not their job. The punishment is the incarceration itself; the correctional officer’s responsibility is maintain the safety of both staff and inmates. Yet if incarceration is defined as punishment, it is very difficult for many of those who have custodial responsibility to not begin to see themselves as responsible for punishment, particularly given the behavior of all too many inmates: destructive, disorderly, defiant, or disgusting (for example, concocting a mixture of urine and feces to throw in an officer’s face).

The punishment model unavoidably leads to a degradation of all those who are involved, and this extends to society as a whole. Beyond delegating punishment to a specialized class whom we either assume are not damaged by it, or we don’t care if they are, an even more egregious example is the fantasy (and reality) that individuals who commit sexual violence will be raped in prison. Delegating sexual assault and violence to other prisoners and vicariously participating in it is the epitome of degradation, yet it is one that our society readily participates.

Punishment never provides relief to the victim or their family—though insufficient retribution certainly makes things worse. For many, there is no punishment that would ever satisfy that understandable desire for revenge. The problem with punishment is that it is a passionate action—and any action in the heat of passion is almost surely askew.

If not punishment, how about rehabilitation? Despite uncountable billions of dollars spent, the rehabilitation model is largely a failure. The inmates are, for the most part, in environments where rehabilitation is very difficult to accomplish.No matter what word we use to label incarceration, the idea that prisoners deserve to live in hell-holes still pervades our thinking. We resent the concept that prisoners should be comfortable, should live in environments that may be, as recently pointed out by one person I discussed this essay with, better than the life that they lived on the outside. One might ask: what level of cuisine, how soft a mattress, how many channels on the communal TV, how extensive the library, how liberal conjugal visits are afforded, are requisite for a rehabilitation model to be successful? And truth be told, a considerable number of individuals in prison are committed to being criminals, the same way Ted Cruz or AOC are committed to being politicians—it is their job, their career—or simply their nature.

In many prisons and jails, day-to-day life is run by prison gangs, and in such places, one cannot opt out. Racial segregation is de facto mandatory in many prisons, the environment being so dysfunctional that the administration of the prison encourages racial and gang separation. If one tries to disassociate oneself from this culture by taking classes or learning a trade, like a crab trying to escape a bucket, others will pull him down. A perfect illustration of the toxic environment in prisons is that many inmates hide their release date because others will deliberately undermine them, enmesh them in situations that will destroy their “good time,” and get them charged with new crimes.

Those who favor punishment regard rehabilitation as an attempt to coddle and excuse the irredeemable. Those who favor rehabilitation see punishment as a policy that breeds hatred and failure, with more recidivism and crime the result. Nowhere is this more apparent when it comes to the consideration of those deemed mentally ill, who are, allegedly, not responsible for their actions: it is a go-to to “brush-aside” even the most heinous actions, such as terrorist slaughter, violent torture or rape, by asserting that the perpetrator is “mentally ill.” For many, regarding a murderer or rapist as “sick” is far preferable than regarding them as evil. The designation of mental illness, often seems to be a free pass—a category so vague, so all encompassing, that some clinicians can make almost anything into an illness if they choose. For example, there has been an attempt by some theorists to turn sexual assault into a mental illness: “sadistic personality disorder.” Were this accomplished, individuals “suffering from the desire to cause suffering” would have surely received different sentences, perhaps no sentence at all.

Those who commit crimes who are deemed mentally ill, it is believed, do not know they have committed a crime, are unable <not> to commit a crime, or at least, due to their delusions, they are not “responsible” for their actions. They and others deemed insane are placed for a period of time in a psychiatric facility, then released when medical professionals deem them no longer a danger or sane, defining their crime solely as an outcome of an illness that they believe is in remission. [Since they are classified as “not guilty by reason of insanity,” there is no ground to hold them once they are deemed sane.]

Norway has tried to take the rehabilitation model as far as one can. In essence, the only right that is restricted when sentenced to prison is a restriction of liberty, at least for the majority of inmates who are compliant. Inmates can still vote, and receive exemplary education and healthcare. In addition, prisons offer vocational training as well as mental health and substance abuse treatment. To avoid “institutionalization,” they try to replicate daily life as much as possible, with the exception that institutions are sex segregated. Correctional officers are trained as role models for the inmates; they can be viewed almost as mentors. Facilities are small, and placed close to the inmates homes, so that family ties are easier to maintain. Their cells resemble apartments and they have private bathrooms, TVs and windows with views. Even maximum-security prisons emphasize normal routines, and strive to enhanced dignity and trust. The staff ratios in these facilities are astonishingly high, when compared to America: as much as 1:1+. The results are telling—among the lowest recidivism rates in the world (approximately twenty percent within two years). The prisons are far safer, with much less inmate-on-inmate violence as well as much less inmate-towards-staff violence.

Elements of this program have been tried in the United states: pilot programs mostly – in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and other states. Early reports do show reduced disciplinary actions and much less violence; however inmates are carefully selected as potentially successful for the program. In addition, it is hard to imagine implementing this model wholesale into the United States. There are already severe staffing shortages in most American prisons: you cannot establish a mentorship relationship between officer and inmate when each officer may be responsible for forty or fifty inmates in a unit. 2022 statistics show approximately one million eight hundred thousand inmates, and approximately 380,000 correctional officers, and many of the latter are not front-line officers. Also, officers in the Norway model require extensive, specialized training, the equivalent a two-year degree of college level courses. Are we prepared to increase the number of front line fully educated officers tenfold or more? [It is also not a matter of simply scaling things up - Norway currently incarcerates approximately sixty-six individuals per 100,000, whereas the USA incarcerates about 541 per 100,000.]

It must also be noted that Norway prisons are facing a new challenge in the increasing influx of Muslim prisoners, mostly immigrant or second generation, from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. These men (and women) often have an extremely adversarial relationship to the state into which they have immigrated. It is unknown, at this point, if the Norway model—in Norway—will continue to be effective as ever-increasing numbers of serious crimes are committed by immigrants who have little interest into integration within Scandinavian society or culture.

Paradoxically, for this model to work in America, an even higher level of security and supervision would be required than exists now: far higher, in fact. Prison gang culture, deeply intertwined around voluntary racial and geographical segregation, thrives on violence, extortion and codes that prohibit cross-racial interactions. Gangs would view programs such as this as a direct threat to their control—an effort by an inmate to rehabilitate himself or herself is seen as disloyalty to the group, and a rehabilitation model would be in direct opposition to the underground prison economy. Unless there is a way to fully address—and dismantle—gang culture in prisons, it is unlikely that one could fully scale up this style of program beyond small pilot-level experiments.

On a fundamental level, however, both the punishment model and the rehabilitation model are dead-ends, because we are looking at the wrong side. Our primary focus should be on the victims, not the perpetrators, and this includes those not only those who directly suffer from the effects of crime, but also damage to society as a whole.

Consider the family that must visit the grave of their child who was dismembered after a rape; consider the small grocery store owner who no longer can go to his shop because he is so afraid after the thug put a knife to his throat that he no longer leaves his apartment; consider the person who finds her store window broken, graffitied, or scored with a glass cutter, and she cannot afford to replace it yet again, the third window this year; consider the shops closing due to drug addicts sleeping or shooting up in their doorway, and customers no longer willing to walk amongst them, much less step over them, entire downtown areas gutted, given over to hard-core addicts who shamble the sidewalks like stuporous animated puppets; consider people looking at ever-rising tax bills, with the state demanding more while covering up absolutely ineffective housing and drug rehab programs for the homeless, draining billions from the economy; consider people leaving their cars unlocked, with a pleading note to criminals to pass-over their car, that there are no valuables . . . or at least, “please don’t break the windows when you rob me”; consider that the majority of women hesitate taking a walk in a city park, maybe don’t go at all, because . . . well, you know why, don’t you?

And returning to a previous theme, consider people doing violent or otherwise criminal acts, who are deemed insane (and many judges these days include drug intoxication as in this category), who have been detained repeatedly, and immediately freed by judges. Do the loved ones of Iryna Zarutska mourn any less, are they comforted in the least, when they are told by a judge, aided by the informed counsel of experts, that Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. is currently viewed as mentally ill, is insane, is incompetent to stand trial? And let’s say he is? Are those suffering from mental illness, automatons, like ants taken over by one of those fungi that causes them to climb to an exposed high-point, to be devoured by birds, and shit out on the fly so that the spores of the fungus spread to new areas.

When it comes to sentencing individuals to prison, except as to WHERE they are sentenced, we should not care whatsoever if mental illness caused the crime, if some grievance (racism, poverty, financial stress, a bad break-up or inability to hook-up with the woman or man of one’s desires) drove the person towards violence, if an immigrant culture of us-against-them, and loyalty to clan above all then allows the cheating of the welfare or grant system to funnel money back to one’s own people, if a white-collar criminal, a politician or a business owner, who loots millions, knows the right people, votes for the right party and coaches his or her daughter’s volley ball team.

Rather than getting shipwrecked on the spars of punishment and rehabilitation, we should abandon both of them, on a philosophical level, as to why we incarcerate people at all. To properly serve the victims, who should be our primary concern, to avoid the degradation that comes with punishment, or the ineffectual well-meaning wooly-mindedness of centering policy on rehabilitation, what then is the alternative?

Humane sequestration

When one does a crime, one should be sequestered from society. We need you gone. If you are a murderer, ultra-violent individual, child molester or rapist—perhaps forever. As for other crimes, for a period of time. While you are gone, we are safe from you. There should be a range, but a much narrower range, of sentencing for each crime. There should be no place for a judge’s sentimentality, because one shares the same social background or culture, or the criminal reminds them of their nephew, or the story of their childhood tugs the heartstrings, or if they are schizophrenic, bipolar or psychopathic. Within a model of sequestration, with facilities that are impossible to escape from, the Norway model has some possibilities—for those individuals who are amenable to it. Within sequestration there can be any amount of rehabilitation services, but not because incarceration follows a rehabilitation model. Why, then, should such services be available? Because it is humane and it is in our own best interest. If they are drug addicted, they are sequestered in a treatment facility, that really uses the state-of-the-art treatment for addiction, and once clean, they can have an opportunity to enter a an inescapable, but less-restrictive environment, or at least sequestered in surroundings that will help them maintain sobriety. If they suffer from a mental illness, they are placed in a facility that provides genuine mental health services, and when in remission, they are NOT simply dumped back into the general population of a prison where they will soon deteriorate.

But if less restrictive settings are provided, even a Norway-type model, all inmates get one chance. Only one chance. If they scam the system, if they break the rules, they go to a [still humane] facility that is much more restrictive. And if they are non-compliant with that, there are further tiers of restriction (not inhumanity) all the way to super-maxes that would still be necessary for the ultra-violent, for gang-leaders, etc.

For those who have no interest in becoming better human beings, unlimited television is fine by me: placed in the wall in each cell, embedded behind tempered glass, with voice-activated controls for channel changes. Not tablets as there are in California prisons that give inmates the opportunity to use them to commit more crimes or download porn. Sequestered, they can live the rest of their lives in the soft-machine. For others, who are not content to deliquesce into eating-shitting-passively-viewing organisms: books, and art supplies, and all sorts of training programs. So much can be and will be, ever increasingly, available through AI. For those too dangerous to be in the physical company of others, in-house video-calling, perhaps, to have conversations, so they do not go mad through lack of human contact, maybe even communication with their families—but everything monitored by AI and with an absolute loss of such privileges if the prisoner is intimidating, manipulative, or otherwise indecent in their communication with those outside. There should be no opportunity to continue to do crimes by proxy from their cell.

And for those who are never released, they have the opportunity to be like a desert saint on a pillar or monk in a cave. Well-read, enlightened and compassionate, and forever sequestered from the rest of us. They can write books for us, compose music, enlighten us and contribute to the world: sequestered forever.

And again, what of the mentally ill? They would be placed in secure facilities that offer treatment. But their sentence would be unchanged; they will not be deemed “not guilty by reason of insanity;” they should be classified as “guilty and insane.” If they are healed from their illness, part of a manifestation of their healing would be their understanding that their presence is a violation of society, were they to be released after a short time. Why should we be expected to trust that they will not discontinue their medications or comply with therapeutic recommendations, or abstain from intoxicants, when there are no good predictors who will be compliant and who will not? Why should the families of their victims be asked to trust some pronouncement by mental health professionals when there are no adequate vehicles to ascertain who will be non-violent in the future. The criminal who is suffering from mental illness should not be entitled to be released—because they still stabbed a young woman in the neck, beat an elderly man or shoved someone on the train tracks. They should be humanely kept, sequestered, in a well-run, humane, safe, prison that functions, also, as a mental health treatment facility, then released when their time is up, just like anyone else. Humane sequestration means that we will not be coarsened by the actions and intentions of punishment, and we will not naively trust the promises of rehabilitation, much less that of “restorative justice.” We simply titrate, as best we can, the presence of those willing to break the laws, among us.

Has sequestration been tried? Consider El Salvador. Until very recently, it had one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and the rate of sexual assault was horrific. No longer. It is one of the safest countries in the world for girls and women, and the homicide rate is miniscule. But we could do better. El Salvador’s ferocious courage is certainly humane towards those who wish to live in a peaceful society, but it is inhumane to those it incarcerates, not the least of which is because there is, reportedly, little to no redress if one were incorrectly detained. It would be far more expensive to do things humanely, but we should, simply because it is the right thing to do. And furthermore, because, in the United States, in most cases, people will eventually be released from prison, humane incarceration will make things safer for us all, as those willing to learn how to be decent social beings will have the opportunity to do so.

Robust studies have repeatedly established that a small cohort of individuals commit the bulk of crimes in any society. Let them live apart from us. Let us not place them in degraded circumstances or degrade ourselves in a desire to cause them pain. Let us give them every chance to change, even those who will never again walk among us. But let our focus be on the well-being of the non-criminal, on the vulnerable, and on those who wish to live peacefully alongside each other.

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