Our prison system in California is the social equivalent of an 18th century butter churn. You know, the wood bucket with the long wooden handle and dasher. To make butter, you put milk in the bucket, put the handle through the hole in the lid, push the lid down tight and get some low-level person in the family to push the handle up and down vigorously for hours. Here’s an enlightening definition from that period:
Churn – a vessel in which butter, by long and violent agitation, is separated from the serous part of milk.
“Long and violent agitation.” That’s not a bad description of the prison experience for most inmates today. As a society we churn people through the system at an alarming rate. In a typical year around 125,000 inmates are released from California prisons. If none of them came back and no one committed any more crimes, the prison population would drop to 45,000 inmates just like that. But they do come back and there are new crimes, so for each prisoner released this year there will be another person coming in to take his place. Rarely will the replacement be a person who has never been in prison; this is someone coming back again. That’s why discussions of “early release” to achieve an overall population reduction of 40,000 are so meaningless, maybe even silly.
The classic 18th Century butter churn.
At any given time, we have around 170,000 inmates in the California prisons. There are another 110,000 persons on active parole out on the streets and another 20,000 parolees at large, etc. That’s 300,000 people at some stage of supervision (or lack of it) by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. That’s the size of our total churn. Oh, once in a while, a few new ones come in and a few old ones don’t come back, but our core group is pretty stable – “doing life on the installment plan” as most inmates describe it. When you look at it that way the real question begins to emerge – how do we reduce not the number of people sleeping in prison beds on any given night but the total number of people being supervised/managed/watched?
From a churn standpoint, we must either produce more butter – meaning more people get “rehabilitated” and don’t come back, or else we reduce the amount of milk in the churn. Staring this real question straight in the eyes, you come to understand we don’t know how to do either of those things that would reduce the churn. Socially and sociologically speaking we’re Neanderthals. In 1800, we were churning butter by hand in wooden buckets. Being the dawn of the industrial revolution we believed there could be faster and better ways to do this. Today, using technologies we’ve developed over those 200 years, we have machinery that quickly and consistently produces all the good butter any of us could ever want – and it seems almost effortless. We now can go to any supermarket in this country, get the highest quality butter humanity has ever known, take it home and use it in cooking, baking, whatever. Why has the “science” of corrections, penology if you like, fallen so far behind?
This is the modern version of a butter churn.
There’s an old saying about weather – everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Corrections is sort of like that. Ask any person you meet, they’ll instantly offer an opinion about what’s wrong with the prison system and what it will take to make it work. These range from the basest know-nothings who say lock them all up and throw away the key to knowledgeable, experienced folks who have contributed to reports of the Little Hoover Commissions, Dr. Joan Petersilia who has offered so much good direction the last few years, and other credible observers. Yet we never seem to get past that old wooden bucket and the never-ending churn. Why is this? Here are my favorite probabilities:
1. We’re too ignorant to figure out how to be better at butter. When it comes to human behavior – what makes some people do hurtful things versus doing helpful things, we are dumb as dirt clods. Look at the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, and you would think we knew something about human behavior. But obviously we have at least 300,000 people in California we don’t know how to “fix.” For the most part, we throw up our hands at their behavior and just give up. We do know enough about chemistry to keep a lot of them semi-permanently sedated, but that doesn’t make any butter for us. We made some advances in the nineteenth century, (Osborne, Brockway, MacCormack, et.al.) but in many ways we seem worse now than 100 years ago. I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago and the social workers were in town having their annual conventions – literally tens of thousands of social workers. I talked to one as we looked over a menu posted outside a prospective restaurant, and I asked him, “If we have so many social workers, why do we still have so many social problems?” He sneered at me, said “That’s a ridiculous question,” and walked off. I do have a lot of questions. The answers don’t seem to be that great.
2. We don’t care about getting better at butter. There appears ample evidence that we’ve become a narcissistic bunch; we don’t really care much about one another. As long as my buds can come over on Sunday and watch the game on my big screen and somebody brings the beer, who cares! Until something happens to interrupt the fun, we don’t take an interest in much outside ourselves. That’s bleak, but the facts are there. We don’t care enough to take homeless women and children off the dangerous streets; our infant mortality rates approach third world status; the education system falls farther behind other countries each year. Prisons are always low priority in social services, and if we don’t care if many of our fellow citizens live or die, why would we care about a few desperados in prison?
3. Great politics is pragmatically more useful than getting better at butter. Richard Nixon got himself elected president in 1968 by scaring people about crime and civil unrest. There were riots in the streets and he promised “law and order.” Politicians ever since have been getting themselves into elected office claiming to be “tough on crime.” And if some tough-on-crime is good, more must surely be better. To look tougher than the other guy, we passed ever more draconian laws and built more prisons – essentially making our churn bigger and adding more and more milk with no expectation we’d ever get any butter. Pragmatically, it’s more productive to fight about it than fix it. Rising costs may be making this less politically effective than in the past, and politicians are now hiding from it every chance they get. Maybe that’s progress.
4. Being bad at butter has simply become a deeply entrenched aspect of the U.S. economic system and changing it would be too disruptive. In a capitalistic system, you must either produce or you must consume. If you produce, you must have the means to produce (capital, work skills, raw materials, production machinery, transport capacity, etc.), if you consume, you must have the means to consume (money). If you have no work skills or you don’t want to work, or if you’re mentally or physically defective, a capitalistic system sees you as unnecessary at best and a detriment to good economy at worst. The system does not want to expend production resources on you and since you haven’t the means (money) to consume, you don’t fit; you really aren’t wanted. But we can’t have you out there making life unpleasant for the producers and consumers either. So prison is a convenient alternative. And the movement from helping people (mental institutions, vocational training, physical rehabilitation, etc.) to the crass warehousing of humans has taken place very effectively over the last 30 or 40 years and, in fact, been institutionalized in itself. So successful has it been, we now have a flourishing private prison industry to provide efficient warehousing. Recently I read a business forecast that suggested buying stock in companies providing private prison capacity would be good, sound investing. That’s capitalism for you.
If you think our current system of so-called criminal justice is good, I suggest next time you want butter, travel back in time to 1750. Just grab that churn handle and sit down for a good, long session of hard work. And hope you had good milk to start with and the butter you end up with is actually edible. If we want a better system for treating people, we better get to work. We’re a long, long way behind.
Prisoners All 
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