"Abandon hope all ye who enter here." (Visit Stateville at your own emotional risk.)
My video commentary in my last post related to the insanity of ridiculously harsh penalties for producing, transporting, selling or consuming illegal recreational drugs. It’s your body. Do what you want with it.
Now, that said, if you watched the full segment of the portion I featured from the Stateville episode of National Geographic Television’s “Lockdown,” you might have noticed that Mr. Super Dad Drug Dealer was actually convicted of murder. OK, that’s not so good. It’s your body. Do what you want with it, as long as you don’t use it to hurt other people’s bodies.
Still, regardless of crime — and, yes, I understand that many crimes are horrorshow heinously unforgivable — no human being should be locked up in a place as horrorshow disturbing as the Stateville Correctional Facility. Honestly. Even the poor guards are living in a soul-damaging hell that flips my stomach inside out. Way too much human suffering to try to digest. This place shouldn’t exist. (All links are coming, but you can start here, if you want to see what I’m on about.)
What would Dante think of Stateville? Level Ten or No Way?
I wonder what that horrorshow poet Dante Alighieri would have thought about Stateville. On the one hand, with his Hellish imagination, I can see him saying, “Right on! Add this as the tenth circle of Hell.” But then again, I’m not so sure. Dante was writing a condemning critique of his political and religious contemporaries, no? Poetics aside, my understanding is that to Dante the worst form of punishment was banishment, also called ostracizing, also called being forced out of town. Dante himself was ostracized from his beloved Florence, I’m pretty sure. To Dante, Florance was the world, and getting kicked out would be somewhat like a modern American getting kicked off the Earth in an endlessly drifting little space capsule. That would suck. After all, life is not really worth living when you’re all alone — especially knowing that others are free and making love. The Ancient Greeks (who came up with the word “ostracize“) knew this well, preferring to banish undesirables (usually political foes) rather than simply kill them. At least there is relief in death. What is the point of living if you cannot live with Your People?
It was in college that I learned that in Ancient Greece the practice of ostracization was the most horrorshow horrible fate a member of society could endure. At first I didn’t get it. Hey, you’re still alive, no? But then slowly I came to understand that an Athenian not in Athens is like a modern American in that little space capsule, floating in horrorshow solitude in the endless blackness of space. It was at this point that I came to realize what I believe should be the function of all prisons. They should do no more and no less than to humanely remove people from society: to ostracize them.
My thought has been that, even if your prison is like a country club, it still will suck total horrorshow nightmarish as long the society you have been removed from is better than your country club. Who wants to be kept away from society when there are jobs to be had, families to be made, friends to enjoy and, more than anything, freedom. Freedom is one hell of a thing. Especially if you can enjoy it in a civil, just society.
As you can see, my type of penal system will only work if society is working — perfectly. Society has to be pretty damn satisfying for people avoid the activities that would see them taken away from it.
Society should be horrorshow wonderful; prisons should just be humane ostracization centers.
I know what you’re thinking. Society will never be so pleasant as to make country-club prisons effective deterrents to would-be criminals. I agree. But let’s take a leap anyway.
2,773 men housed in a soul-killing facility build for 1,506, at a cost of more than $33K per year per inmate. Is Stateville insane or what?
The leap anyway is to fix one problem before we fix the other. Let’s make prisons humane, which isn’t very hard, even before we make our society utterly desirable, which will take a really long time at the quickest. One thing at a time.
For those of you who find this argument pithy, wimpy or just feeble-minded, you might be the type to worry that most prisons are “too easy” for the offenders they contain. Those of you with such horrorshow ass-backwards correctional outlooks might cheer when watching “Lockdown.” Others, more sensitive and humane, might wish you hadn’t learned what goes on inside Stateville.
Thanks to the Eye of YouTube and NG’s “Lockdown,” I am now filled with a much better, skin-crawling concept of just how horrible some prisons can be. Watching the entire Stateville episode left me devastated. I had no idea. Honest. With all the prison-centered movies that I have seen and with all the reports I have read and heard about detailing the terrible conditions in prisons (not to mention the tireless references to violent prison rape), well, I really had no idea.
If you are so inclined, check out parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and/or 5 to learn more than you may want to about Stateville, but which, if you are a member of US society, you probably should.
The part of Stateville that really blew my horrorshow socks off was the Roundhouse. (Part I.) It’s circular shape of horror — reserved for the worst of the worst — lends itself perfectly to Dante’s Inferno. It’s magnificently round, spiraling around itself in self-consuming terror that feeds on itself: The suffocated energy of caged, hopeless men. Dante Level 10 here we come.
Maybe Dante could have imagined this. Maybe I’m off base about the exile concept. Maybe this is exactly what he was imagining — both for his contemporaries in life as well as in eternal suffering death. But even so, a real, modern-day peak into this real horrorshow prison makes Dante’s poetic vision of suffering seem like a horrorshow laugh-along. A brief tour of Stateville is to see one of society’s truly worst creations. Even if it houses evil-doers, it represents the truest, coldest and most calculating type of evil of which humankind is capable.
We really outdid ourselves with Stateville. Drink it in, if you dare, and then share your horrorshow thoughts on crime and punishment.