20190423.0430

To continue on with articles LinkedIN recommends for me, I read Robert Glazer's 15 April 2019 piece "What I Learned about Potential from a Day Spent in Prison." The article reflects on Glazer having spent time volunteering at a maximum-security prison and drawing lessons from it, notably the relative normalcy of those incarcerated and the systemic failure to decrease and rehabilitate prison populations. Glazer pivots at the end of the piece to the thought that, if those in some of the most deliberately repressive circumstances can work for meaningful change in themselves, those not in such situations can do much more.
There are problems with the piece, of course. The misery-tourism aspect of the thing attracts attention and grates; it moves towards a white-savior mentality that was a bad idea when it arose and which should be long discarded from its longer history of use as means of abuse and abnegation. That it only moves towards and does not overtly adopt such a mentality is occasioned by the lack of notice paid to the tendency of prison populations to be overwhelmingly people of color; while some concerns of demography are noted, those that work so strongly on populations that become incarcerated are omitted from the piece entirely, which is something else that writers now had damned well ought to know better than to do.
That said, the article does do well to point some things out. For all that carceral research holds that prison populations have long been fluid, people in the United States tend to think of inmates and former inmates as a people apart, rather than as simply another part of the body politic to which any might belong. Glazer seems to work to reassert that the people in prison are people, having the same potential (which can be read as a gloss on "inherent dignity") as any others. Glazer does attract attention to the socioeconomic bias in the criminal justice system, pointing out that one of the major differences between his own demographic and those of the inmates is that he and those like him had access to more robust systems of legal support than those imprisoned; an inmate arrested at age eight is highlighted as a particularly prominent example of someone suffering due to a lack of such a support system. And Glazer also points out the systemic problems that exacerbate crime; harsh sentences do not serve their purported deterrent functions, but only to overcrowd prisons. (He does not address root causes of this, though, which is a weakness.)
At the end, while Glazer raises some good points, he does not seem to go far enough. If he is representative of the platform, it seems there is a damned lot more work to do. I can only shoulder so much of it, myself...