The average lay person who doesn’t have any experience in dealing with the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) would believe that prisons are all about rehabilitation and helping people come out as better human beings. However, a lot of us come out worse than when we went in, unless we took the initiative to do for ourselves what the state would not do.
The PIC is about social control: controlling specific threat groups and populations or demographics that are a potential threat to the status quo and social order. The PIC is also about profiteering; this is why and how private companies like the Geo Group can profit over $1 billion annually. Prisons have never been about crime control and have always been about economics and exploitation/slavery.
Education in prison is used as a political prop and not to enhance or prepare us for re-entry into society. Education is used as a control mechanism. The state and various institutions are quick to quote statistics of how many prisoners are enrolled, how many may actually graduate, etc.. It might even be headline news on the local channel. What isn’t told is how many people who want to go to school in prison can’t because of the waiting list or because of their sentence.
This isn’t absolute or universal, but is generally the rule.
What Isn’t Told
What isn’t being told is that, if I’ve caught a petty ticket, then I can’t participate in a school program or I am removed from one I’m taking. What isn’t revealed are the obstacles placed in our path if we try to take responsibility for our own education or for one another’s education.
On one hand, the state giveth and with the other hand, the state takes away by:
- Placing limits and restrictions on the amount of books we can have
- Counting law books and religious books the same as regular leisure or entertainment books
- Tightening up the policies and restrictions as to who can and can’t send you books, where books can come from far as publishers, used books, Books Thru Bars programs, free books, etc.
The state is dramatically limiting our access to education.
With the level of reactionary violence, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, you would think that in the interest of education, the PIC would want prisoners to have their faces in a book. Yet this is not the case at all.
Why would or does the PIC feel threatened by prisoners who teach other prisoners, putting together study groups, political education classes, etc.?
These acts alone can get you shipped out to another prison, get your security level boosted up, get you placed in solitary, placed in the hole for gang activity – just because you’re trying to learn or educate others.
The State Knows Something Most Prisoners Don’t
The state knows something that most prisoners don’t: Knowledge and education is self-empowerment and it is power. It is a threat to the profit motive and control of the state.
Here is a stark reality that most people don’t know. In most states, the Department of Corrections (D.O.C.) receives federal dollars and grants for having various programs on the books or operational in their facilities. This is no critique of the people who might teach prisoners and might even have our best interests in mind, but they are just a cog in the overall machinery of the PIC. In most cases, if you do not have a short amount of time left to serve, then you can’t even get in a program or class.
Here is how the business works. During your intake into prison and throughout your sentence, you’re asked various questions and surveys as part of the classification process: Have you ever done meth or cocaine? Have you ever committed a sex offense? Have you ever thought about it? How often did you hit your wife or girlfriend etc.?
Often these probing questions are racially and class based and/or stereotypical in general and culturally ignorant. But this stereotypical data is used to generate statistics so the D.O.C. can release reports saying that 65% of incoming inmates have either used or been addicted to meth or opiates and they need x,y,z funds to create a program to treat such.
This is job creation, people. This is part of the growth and continued development of the PIC.
It is this process that creates counselors, therapists, facilitators, consultants, etc., many of whom are either unqualified, disenchanted, or demoralized by a system that won’t support them or give them the tools necessary to do their job. As a result, they just go through the motions and draw a paycheck.
Sadly, a lot of the programs aren’t reality based in our realities as Black or Brown men and women. These programs don’t adequately prepare us to return to a lot of our communities. Many of us are returning to areas that are economically depressed and oppressed, many have civil wars taking place underneath the surface around the drug economy and various markets related to such. Many of us are coming out or have PTSD and other mental health related issues of rage, anger, depression, stress, etc. that go untreated. Talk therapy, counting to ten, and all of that ain’t going to get it when you’re in the ‘hood’ after doing 10 years or more, having spent x amount of time in solitary, and can’t find a job that pays the bills, etc.
Real Education Instills Hope and Faith
You see, when we have real education and treatment programs, they instill hope and faith. They give you other options and they inspire creativity and thinking outside of the box. When you have agencies and community-controlled organizations active in the community around re-entry and that are proactive in attacking the causes of recidivism and the rage visited upon our community by so-called “ex-offenders” out of frustration, only then does higher education become both real and effective.
Be Proactive Now and You Won’t Have To Be Reactive Later.
Yours in Freedom & Justice,
Shaka Shakur 1996207
Buckingham Correctional Center
P.O. Box 430
Dillwyn, Virginia 23936
Email: shakashakur1996207@jpay.com or shaka@shakashakur.org
Written in September 2024.
Featured photo: Inmates at Hillsborough County Juvenile Detention Center 2020. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
