By Just a Guy
Editors note: Just a Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His columns run Mondays and Thursdays. You can read his last post and links to some of his past columns here. He will try to respond to all comments and questions, but it’s tricky to communicate from prison, so be patient.
Were all of you as surprised as I was at the results of American Idol? Hey! Don’t make fun, so I watch Idol with all that extra IDLE time Lance Corcoran, spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, says I will have more of because of the layoff of 3,665 CDCR employees.
The reason I bring up American Idol is I see the results of the voting as similar to the mindset of Californians and the rest of the U.S. when it comes to prisons, inmates, and crime. One of the contestants was clearly a better singer and performer than the other, but the voting seemed not to be based on singing ability, rather by cultural ideologies and societal mores derived from Christian “values.”
What I mean is: one of the finalists was, obviously, “different” than the rest of “us,” so rather than voting for the guy with eye liner and a boyfriend America voted for Ken, Barbie, and their daughter because that’s what we’ve always done.
So it is with prisons and crime, because now Johnny Appleseed has become Johnny the Bad Apple and rather than embrace change it’s easier to fall back on what we’ve been told is correct (pounded in to us since elementary school), and that is: drugs are bad, “criminals” are bad, inmates are bad, ALL police are good, and prisons are good because they protect the public.
Something I noticed since Propositions 1A-1E didn’t pass on Tuesday is that the media and politicians have stopped talking about reductions in prison population and the early release of inmates. Now, they talk about the even deeper slashing of budgets for education, medical and mental-health care, and law enforcement. I am not sure I really understand this language, since “law enforcement” is such an all-encompassing term. It seems as if the word “release” is synonymous with Dalit (the Indian word for untouchable).
Maybe if we don’t mention the problem of prison overcrowding, it will just go away. Maybe if don’t mention releases, the CCPOA won’t say anything either, and we can let inmates go (or not) and nobody will notice.