Thread by @JoshuaBHoe

I remember a place called the "transportation center" where we were kept in kennels (like for dogs but taller), still cuffed, and if you needed to urinate, you had to do it a pitcher in front of everyone and still cuffed...so many ways incarcerated people are treated like animals

https://twitter.com/MarieWaldron75/status/1373012369928982528

And I am sure anyone who has ever been arrested remembers the casual barbarity of jail holding cells, where they pack tons of people in a small room, with one toilet at the end (and the toilet is rarely cleaned) in full few of everyone and where violence is normal

Or, how when you first get processed into prison you are stripped and inspected....or how you are strip searched entering and leaving the visitation room every time...

Or, all the times I saw people beaten by the goon squads in jails and the rapid response teams in prisons....or the indifference to violence by the correctional officers (which I can actually understand at a certain level....you get numb after a while)

When I was first arrested, I answered the screening questions wrong (admitting I felt a little depressed) and got put in a clear plastic observation cell for the first few days....totally visible at all times and in all ways, in a bam bam suit, kept uncomfortably cold on purpose

Next door to me someone was so traumatized she just cried all night..another person was clearly in mental crisis and screamed....later, I met someone who had been kept in solitary for over a year "for mental health reasons" (because nothing is better for mental health apparently)

Then there is the constant food deprivation, the built-in incentives for resource competition, the constant humiliation and violence....amazing any of us made it back in one piece and with our faculties

I was at one facility where it was rare that three days went by without someone getting beaten down or stabbed....we learned how to read the yard so we knew when trouble was coming and could get out of the way of the tornado

At another facility, I remember seeing one of the people from the mental health wing being so doped up or out of it, he had one shoe on and one shoe off and was just shuffling across the yard like he was lost

Many correctional officers would go out of their way to be cruel, I remember one officer yelling out people's crimes on the yard (which could get someone attacked.which was the point). Others only referring to people as numbers or as slurs

In jail, I remember hearing someone get beaten down by the officers, then being moved and having to walk past the blood on the floor (from the violence that had happened just minutes before)....jails and prisons are trauma machines

Inevitably, this is when someone says "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime." But the people who say this have rarely "done the time" and seem to get off on trauma....96% of folks incarcerated are coming back, how do you want them to come home? Traumatized or healed?

What we are doing now heals nobody, helps nobody, and makes everything worse....it is why long-term research shows that, even accounting for incapacitation, prison causes more crime than it prevents

I would make the following bet with almost anyone:

If we invested half of the resources into healing that we invest into manufacturing trauma, we would have much less crime and recidivism (whatever you think that term means).

I could go on all day, there were casual cruelties, like an officer who didn't like you making sure when they cuffed you to put them on extra-tight, especially on your ankle cuffs.....

Or most specifically, I can remember my parole officer telling me "you are being punished, it's supposed to hurt" when she tightened my electronic monitor to the point it was leaving a mark on my leg

I will never forget an officer at quarantine, when I was first incarcerated, taking thirty minutes to sit outside my cell and recite to me all the reasons I wasn't going to make in prison....or the officers who told me they would see me again soon, when I left

At the end of the day, I am pretty sure what "Tough on Crime" really is about is a bunch of people who were not usually the victims of crime getting off on the harsh punishment of people who were convicted of crimes....it creates a permission structure which the system replicates

They love knowing people are being brutalized, they get off on it, they can't get enough of it....they want to keep hearing about how awful it is....they read threads like this and smile...and don't understand the inherent contradiction or see the ethical problem

I am often reluctant to talk about these things because I know some people enjoy it, I don't like creating "trauma-porn."

But I am hopeful, other, more thoughtful people will see the contradictions and come to understand how counterproductive and deeply damaging our system is