As I move through the various stages of the American legal system — arrest, indictment, conviction, incarceration, halfway house, and probation — it becomes clearer to me that one actually loses humanity, dignity and the “right” to an individual identity the longer one stays in the system. When you are arrested, some people have a chance of “standing out from the crowd” and arguing for some modicum of dignity. That presumes, of course, that you don’t have a prior arrest record, which means that you have already been through some part of the system and had your dignity systematically stripped away. By the time you get to “inmate” phase, you are pretty much just generically an “inmate” in the eyes of the state, and every agent of the state is going to treat you with the least amount of respect they can possibly get away with. Even when you get out of prison, the next phases of “justice” are going to presume that you are habitual criminal, and that you will go back to doing whatever it is that got you in trouble in the first place. Such an approach to our fellow humans is not ethically or logically justified, but it sure makes for less work. It takes effort to try to treat people as people. It simplifies all kinds of jobs to treat people as fully known objects. It’s also easier to perpetuate the system itself — and thereby guarantee job security and profits — if you can sell the rest of the public on the stereotype of the felon, too. If they buy into the state’s shameless hype, they won’t ask questions. If they don’t ask questions, the carceral state can just coast along, expending virtually no energy at all.
This brings me to a limerick from July 2017:
Perhaps you have seen there's a rush To paint inmates with only one brush. The state sells is hype With stereotype, But you can't make authority blush.
So if you ever wonder why black men keep getting shot and why more police training never seems to work, just remember that the justice system pretty much has to keep reminding its own people and the public that the folks they encounter every day and dangerous, useless, and unworthy of most forms of human respect. If you encountered people with a mindset that said they were decent, productive, and pretty much just like you, it would be infinitely harder to feed the carceral beast. And if you don’t feed the beast, what’s left for you to do?