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Bar News - January 20, 2006 Book Review: Gates of Injustice: the Crisis in America’s Prisons By Alan Elsner By: Michael K. Brown
There are certain basic fundamental tasks all governments must perform: road maintenance, fire protection, garbage pickup, water and sewer services and the construction, maintenance, and administration of its prisons and jails. Rarely does a day go by that a crime-related story doesn’t splash attention-grabbing headlines across the front pages of our local papers. Many of these stories describe in some detail a heinous crime, the perpetrator’s arrest or his/her encounter with the court system. With all this in-your-face concentration on the crime, it is small wonder there is so little attention paid to the evitable end — prison. The cynics among us would question why more attention should be paid to our prisons. After all, prisons are where bad people go and where the motto “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” may sometimes seem entirely fitting. Those who commit wrongs against the public deserve prison. Right? The answer is most certainly, “Yes.” But the subject matter of Elsner’s book is not whether incarceration is right or wrong; the focus of his book is on the conditions of that incarceration and sometimes they “ain’t pretty.” Most people behind bars have been put there on more than one occasion for behavior the vast majority of us would describe as reprehensible. Simply put, they deserve to be locked up. Our prisons, however, are an expression of the values that we as a society embrace. They are a reflection of public policy decisions made by all of us, wittingly or unwittingly, and endorsed by the people we elect or appoint to positions affecting the management and conditions of our prison system. Yet most people have no idea what it takes to successfully run a humane prison or why they should even care. There are at least two over-arching reasons we all should care about prisons: people and money. The United States incarcerates 5 to 10 times more people than other democracies do. More Americans are behind bars than are working on farms or in higher education or in public welfare. In fact, there are more Americans behind bars than the populations of metropolitan Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. combined! In total, there are over 6.6 million people in the United States under some sort of correctional supervision. The cost to local, state and federal taxpayers is measured in the tens of billions of dollars. In 2001 alone the total price tag was over $49 billion dollars. Elsner takes the reader on a journey behind the thick gray walls of a number of prisons, all of which have been involved in some sort of legal action. He provides well-documented detail describing the hardship encountered by inmates serving time and does so in a well-written and entertaining way. This book could be a depressing read, but instead, it is an interesting inside-look at a segment of our government most readers never get, or take the opportunity to learn about. Most inmates come to prison severely under-educated, under-skilled and in a poor state of health, sometimes exacerbated by long-term substance abuse. Many have been abandoned as children/young people or have come from dysfunctional families, often suffering from the effects of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The resulting lifetime burdens caused by these horrors are stunning; they cost the inmates and taxpayers dearly. The reality is that our prisons are human service agencies, albeit with bars and razor wire, and are the custodians of society’s most intractable problems. In working with governmental appropriations, the wardens of our penal institutions are forced to pit budgetary constraints against security obligations and the ever-increasing needs of a burgeoning inmate population, but with fewer staff members and resources to work with. The criminal justice system is only as strong as its weakest link and Elsner’s book is an eye-opener. His intimate look at prisons often finds them dysfunctional and frequently inhumane. Elsner is not an entirely objective writer, in the respect that he does not write about some of the good prisons, but focuses only on the bad. He also ignores the fact that prisoners often have access to health care that they would not otherwise have. Since American prisons are on the front lines of public health epidemics such as AIDS and hepatitis, making health care available to this population is no small matter when considering the public’s interest in controlling disease. Elsner expresses his bias by describing the worst any prison system might have to offer — but that IS the point of his book: to introduce readers to the world of prisons by shocking them into awareness. For example, Elsner writes that 75 percent of all the inmates in our prison systems were abusing drugs or alcohol up to the time of their crimes, yet only 15 percent receive any form of treatment. He discusses in some detail what some inmates have had to endure while serving their sentences. He describes the brutal rape of a 5-foot, 2-inch, 125-pound male inmate who later commits suicide because of it. He also writes about the 283,000 mentally ill inmates whose access to mental health care is impeded by a lack of competent treatment staff, resulting in what amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment.” Elsner’s Gates of Injustice paints a bleak picture. He records the failings of a prison health care system in which a female inmate was diagnosed with HIV, was reporting significant weight loss and spitting up blood, and yet was accused of “refusing to work” and forced to return to her prison job while gravely ill. Elsner talks about prison suicide, prison violence and about the plight of women behind bars. He writes about the emergence of the so-called Supermax prisons whose stark and often emotionally brutal environment causes inmates to suffer from the effects of severe social deprivation. He attempts to end his book on a more positive note, however, by offering “some modest suggestions” on what he thinks can be done to make our prisons safer and more humane. This book is not for the faint of heart. It takes the reader into a world most of us will never see and will never want to see. But by forcing us to go there, Elsner makes readers expand their minds and think outside the big gray box. Michael K. Brown is with the NH Attorney General’s office and has been a member of the NH Bar since 1984. This Prentice Hall publication is available in hard cover but will soon be out in paperback.
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Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons|
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