Increased violence in prisons? Ideas from a resident!

The MLive newspaper chain recently published a story about a surge in violence at the St. Louis Correctional Facility. We’ve been hearing reports that the MDOC is working on solutions for violence, which seems to be increasing throughout the system. 

An HFP client, a good writer who also has good insight, offers some suggestions. I think his ideas are worth sharing. 

“A good start,” says my friend Douglas, “is to go back and copy what it was like when I came in rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.” 

Here are his suggestions. 

-“Create jobs. This place is the most miserly paying joint I've been to, and with the fewest and most meaningless jobs. Idleness is truly the Devil's workshop, so just allowing men who've already shown a propensity toward violating the law to walk endless circles when they're not locked down is a recipe for all manner of assaults. People who worked in the factories generally did not want to mess up, and even the less desirable jobs, like yard crew, had triple the number employed here as well as better pay. People learning a trade, with a decent paycheck and something to actually do, are far less likely to get into trouble. 

-“Allow us to run our own programs again like Jaycees, NAACP, and others. The projects and classes we offered developed a sense of community pride and gave people skills. Sure, the MDOC offers stuff like VPP and this Vocational Village, but anything mandatory is viewed with hostility. And because it comes at the end of a person's sentence, how much good is it when a guy has felt like his time has been wasted over the past five, ten, or thirty years? Give someone something to care about and they're far less likely to risk it being taken away. 

-“Bring back punishment for substance abuse. I don't know which foolish MDOC official ordered staff to not put people in seg/higher security, take away visits, and put the offender on months of sanctions, but whoever it was is responsible for this mess! Guards see and hear guys collecting juice cartons in the chow hall and rarely stop them. What the heck else do you think a guy carrying 20 cups of orange juice is going to do? Then there's the guards in the unit like the woman last night who saw a guy delivering a jug to a group of inmates. It was so brazen that she went to their room and made them pour it out. She later said the offender shouldn't complain because she let them keep their bottles. WTF?!? No tickets, just the loss of an extra cup or two of spud juice? Later these guys were just one of many groups of obnoxious drunks hanging out in the hallway again. Rules without enforcement are no rules at all. This lax attitude spills over into everything, creating the very crises they say they want to stop. Blame the convict all they want…it is staff apathy which emboldens people to keep pushing the boundaries.” 

The MDOC might do well to listen to the people living in these joints!