CHANGING THE SYSTEM
BY RICHARD KORN, Ph.D
Change is inherently stymied by the fact that the "system" is
overwhelmingly effective in providing each of its participants with a realistic
cop-out-a factual reason for believing that the root causes of all problems
were beyond his personal or group competence to affect. Acceptance of this
assumption creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat for any sustained
effort in basically new directions.
The fundamental thrust of the criminal justice process-coercion and disablement-has
always corrupted, subverted or co-opted any new procedure at odds with its
basic values.It is the vested interest of the representatives of the Criminal
Justice System to keep interaction on a general, informational, objective
plane. Judges can tolerate objective indictments of the justice process;
legislators can admit that legislative decisions are influenced by political
consideration; correctional people can talk ad infinitum about the failings
of correction-every one can talk about "conditions" out there,
which are lamentable. Policemen can even admit that police brutality "happens"
and that racism is a "problem."
But no judge wants to learn that he himself is part of the hypocrisy of
justice, no correctional worker wants to learn that he himself is a time-serving,
beaten-down hack, doing a job in which he no longer believes, no professional
wants to be reminded that he is a eunuchoid nagging old lady at best-and
a gutless accomplice at worst. And no con wants to have it rubbed in his
face that he is or has been a vicious, lying, manipulative bastard who is
whining now because he is temporarily unable to whip others as badly as
he himself is being whipped.
In short, none of these antagonists wants to have it brought home to him
that he, in his own sphere, has been as "bad"-as self-serving,
as deceiving and self-deceiving, as oppressive, as uncaring, and as exploitative
as the worst category of person in his own imagination. And this is particularly
true of the self-proclaimed do-gooders, the self-righteous ones of left
or right, who cherish and trade on the illusion that at least they, themselves,
are pure in a corrupt world.
As long as those in any system or community passively accept the idea that
their troubles are due to remote forces they cannot affect, they will continue
to endure them until their troubles become unbearable. Only when they are
unbearable will they begin to take direct action. However, their typical
action is to find some scapegoat, a "you" that the "I"
can blame for their difficulties. This is a dangerous moment: a time of
conflict and potential escalation. Only when enough people can acknowledge
their own part in their difficulties and accept their own responsibility
for direct joint action can there be change without the forfeit of common
humanity and equity.
Training Schools Needed
What we ask of people we put in prison is conformity, something we do not
want for ourselves or anyone we love.
In prison we want people to conform to rules that have no meaning outside.
We call it correction, but it is not correction.
What we need is a new-careers program. Under it the massive institutions
would be gradually dispensed with, giving way to community-based and neighborhood
correction centers. The inmates would be given responsible, meaningful jobs,
often working with youthful offenders in an attempt to stop the young men
from becoming professional criminals.
We could transform largely custodial facilities into "schools for social
change," in which those who are incarcerated would work together with
those who administered justice toward a credible new dawn in criminal justice
itself. To be sure, this process would be gradual, taking place within such
individuals and such institutions as could be engaged by the personnel who
had already gone through the process. In a word, we were talking about converting
"training schools for crime" into "training schools in correctional
change," making it possible that every judge, every prosecutor, every
penal administrator, every police administrator, eventually legislator,
and finally any citizen concerned with crime and justice have the opportunity,
as part of his work or civic duty, to attend an ongoing "living college"
experience in every institution.
Four years ago, I shared my discontent with some former students from the
Sixties in California. The result was a design which could actually come
into being if there were a collective will to make it happen. I received
an invitation to create my college on the spacious ground of a local jail.
My faculty and I were to have unrestricted use of the campus. I spent the
next year designing a program which would have a chance of accomplishing
our objectives.
A school that took its mission seriously would design a program which would
place thousands of courageous and intelligent college students on the street,
providing credible role models for neglected and endangered youth, gaining
experience not available in books and earning college credit for it. At
present our best and brightest remain cloistered in the library, reading
words that are dull and essentially irrelevant, written by the same kind
of people who put them to sleep in the classroom. At our college, students
would earn a degree requiring three semesters of residence at a correctional
facility. They would enter the college in handcuffs and spend a month living
with real convicts in a real jail. During the third week they would be asked
to design a better jail environment-and during their fourth week they would
test their design by living in it.
Following that experience, they would serve at least two weeks as correctional
officers, thereby learning that the keeper of the keys is a prisoner too.
Next, they would work for two weeks as correctional counselors. In the course
of doing that job effectively they would learn what typically happens to
those who are overly concerned with convicts. They would find themselves
jobless and homeless on the streets of a great city. They would eventually
get themselves on welfare, tasting to its dregs the cup of public charity.
Their last experience would be to live for a week in a local mental hospital,
trying to prove to a bored and overloaded staff that they are not really
crazy. If they survive all this, they would enter their formal studies as
penal reformers. Studying with them, in addition to the convicts, will be
planners sent by the ministers of justice of foreign countries.
Imagine that such programs became a vital part of every facility. Imagine
that every convict would have the chance to meet and speak with present
and future government and justice officials-not just in some idyllic retreat
center but in the Big Yard, under the shadow of the gun towers, in the mess
halls, on the job in the kitchen, the laundry, while mopping floors in the
cell blocks.
What would happen to the atmosphere of those cell blocks if they were constantly
occupied by a changing but representative handful of the men and women who
will one day run our courts, serve in our legislatures, drive the squad
cars, walk the blocks as correctional officers? What if many concerned private
citizens-some of them crime victims-could rise above their justifiable resentment
and walk the Yard, if only for a day or two, with the men and women they
sent there? Would any of them be the same? Would the convicts be the same?
Would we be the same?
Necessary Changes A transformation of the governing ethic from an ethic
of revenge-through-disablement and mutual alienation into an ethic of mutual
reconciliation based upon mutual restitution, including some system of compensation
to the victims of crime.
The new context of correctional effort should be
1. Community-based and internally autonomous rather than institutional-based
and bureaucratically controlled;
2. Informal and personal rather than formal and professional;
3. Evocative, enabling, and creative rather than repressive, inhibitory,
corrective, or "therapeutic";
4. Mutually contractual rather than unilaterally obligatory.
Ironically, few, if any, of these suggested "innovations" are
either radical or new. A program which in effect envisages an informally
organized, unofficial system of correctional alternatives, paralleling but
rarely intersecting the official system, has in fact operated for many years.
At this moment, it is none other than the program now employed by the well-to-do
on behalf of their deviant members. The civil settlement of wrongs which
could be prosecuted as crimes has long employed restitution to the victims
as an alternative to imprisonment of the offender. In every middle-class
and upper-class community there are psychiatrists specializing in the treatment
of the errant youth of the well-heeled, frequently with the full approval
of the police and judicial authorities.
Should private outpatient treatment prove inadequate, there is a nationwide
network of relatively exclusive residential facilities outside the home
community. Every Sunday, the New York Times publishes detailed advertisements
by private boarding schools catering to the needs of "exceptional youth"
who are "unreachable" by means of "conventional educational
methods."
Keeping children out of reformatories is a widely approved and worthy object,
irrespective of whether the children are rich or poor. The scandal lies
in the fact that such alternatives are denied to the poor through the incidental
fact of their inferior economic position. The inequity of this situation
provides one of the strongest moral grounds for overcoming it. Once it is
recognized that the "new" approaches advocated for the correctional
treatment of all are essentially similar to those already serving the well-to-do,
the ethical argument for making those services universally available becomes
unassailable.
Fifty-seven years ago an ex-prisoner, Julian Hawthorne, said in his book
The Subterranean Brotherhood, ". . . nothing is more certain in my
opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it be
not abolished by statute, it will be by force." The revolt predicted
by Hawthorne has already begun in our prisons. There is every indication
that it will escalate. The accompanying turmoil will either be the midwife
of a new era of criminal justice or will precipitate a wave of repression
which will drown any hope of progress in a bloodbath. In any event, the
collision between the awakened political consciousness of the imprisoned
and the increasingly violent counter-insurgency of some of their keepers
will shortly overrun the middle ground now precariously held by the moderates
of both sides. Given the close emotional and intellectual ties between the
socially oppressed within and outside of the walls, it becomes doubtful
that the conflict might be contained within the prison.
Penal reform has failed in this country: there was too little of it, it
was too slow, and what there was of it was invariably dressed in a rhetoric
so inflated that the actual achievement was always discredited by the pretense.
The time is past when the wielders of legitimated violence can count on
their immunity from the fury they inspire in their victims. In a moral vacuum
the resistance of the oppressed must become the involuntary conscience of
the oppressor. The change called for is the transformation of a criminal
justice system based on retaliation and disablement to a system based on
reconciliation through mutual restitution. (More about that in the next
issue of NCX)
