What Do Prisoners Want?
Retribution? Respect? Love? Nothing?
For whatever reason, this question doesn’t get asked often—and when it does, the answer varies widely depending on who’s asked. From my time working inside prisons and on criminal justice reform more broadly, I’d contend there are (at least) five things that are worth considering if one’s goal is to help this incredibly important, yet systematically neglected population.
1. Dignity
Whether you have an idea for an intervention that might assist incarcerated individuals with their day-to-day, have a policy suggestion for your elected officials, or know someone in prison whose life you want to make just a bit better, this should almost always come first. Dignity is an amalgam of self-respect, respect from others, and an overall feeling that life still has some lasting meaning to it. A phenomenal piece by Aaron Ernst in The Marshall Project details how “dignity” might warp into a much darker search for respect, but, by and large, individuals are looking for something close to this definition.
Having sat and listened to dozens of individual stories from current and formerly-incarcerated individuals, one moment in particular shook me. During orientation to a new prison facility, a large, bearded man in his 60s with a full-sleeve tattoo stood up to speak to a group of fifty or so of us gathered in a mid-sized conference room. He shared that he had been in prison for nearly twenty years, and had been shipped around the state from facility to facility over the course of his stay. Some prisons he’d spent time in were passable, some were hard, a few were simply dangerous. Suddenly, his eyes welled and he began to stammer. Heads turned from fellow inmates as the group sent a combination of sympathetic glances and “Are you seriously about to cry” smirks his way. Speaking to the area where wall meets ceiling a few feet above the assistant warden’s head at the front of the room, he said:
“Today—for the first time since I landed in county jail—an officer called me ‘Sir’.”
We waited for what was only around 15 seconds as the air turned to cement. He pulled back his chair and sat down. As the group turned back to the room’s true north, all smirks had been noticeably replaced with guilty glances into palms. The assistant warden, leader of one of the more progressive facilities in the State, added “And that’s what we do around here. We treat you with respect, so long as you treat us the same way.” Without warning, I felt my own eyes well.
2. Financial Security
Those unfamiliar with life behind prison walls imagine inmates are just sitting in their cells all day, reading the same books, graffitiing cell walls, or exchanging lofty stories of bravado from days long past. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Prisoners work—hard. Organizations such as Federal Prison Industries, Inc., which operates under the undoubtedly intentional, much lighter name of UNICOR, is a fully-owned government corporation (originally established via Congressional approval back in 1934), employing inmates for literally pennies on the dollar. Many inmates elect to work multiple jobs, or extended hours just to get basic necessities through commissary or make overpriced phone calls home. For kicks, here is FPI’s Net Industrial Income (i.e. earnings) for FY2019:
Looks innocent enough. To quote this same report:
“In fiscal years 2020 and beyond, FPI will continue to see growth in sales as we satisfy customers’ demands and continue to seek opportunities to expand existing and new product lines.”
Wow, what a sentence. It’s like George Orwell hired an M.B.A. to explain away modern slave labor with some polished, public-private Newspeak. While incredibly (though unsurprisingly) there is no mention of the wages that are ultimately paid to prisoners, they thankfully have had to be placed under Congressional scrutiny. In a recent coverage report, the financial situation of prisoners is made quite clear (though admittedly still requires some de-M.B.A.-ing)
“One criticism of the FPI is that it has a competitive advantage over the private sector. Critics argue that the FPI has lower labor costs. For example, prisoner wages in FPI are far below the minimum wage in the private sector. Critics note that FPI inmate workers earn between $0.23 and $1.15 per hour. Critics also contend that the FPI has other competitive advantages. For example, as a wholly owned government corporation, the FPI is exempt from federal and state income taxes, gross receipt taxes, and property taxes. Also, since the FPI employs federal inmates, health care costs are covered by the BOP. In addition, the BOP pays the cost of building factory space for the FPI and the BOP covers the cost of the FPI's utilities.”
To translate, FPI pays no state and federal taxes, and the Bureau of Prisons gives FPI a huge discount on material benefits. It’s often lost on folks evaluating the state of incarcerated individuals, but imagine for a second making $.50/hour for an extended period of time as your family struggles to make rent. Factor that into the wealth management forecast. People in prison need financial help, and any solution that has their financial well-being and the well-being of their family in mind will have natural gravity.
In short, prisoners want—and need—money.
3. Family Support & Reunification
The following excerpt begins Aaron Ernst’s aforementioned piece in The Marshall Project:
“One evening last July, I was on a phone call with my girlfriend Taemi that would no doubt end like all the others: with me hating myself and wondering why I called in the first place. That seemed to be our routine. Still, I’d line up for the telephone each night and spend half of my 45-minute rec time receiving a sustained dose of verbal bashing from someone who was supposed to love me — about all I’d done wrong, all the shame I should feel, and so on.
This seemed to be the norm for quite a few of my fellow offenders. Gluttons for punishment and prisoners of our past wrongdoing, we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop calling home. Most of us were hooked on abusive relationships, and had been for years.”
Being in prison slices at the core of one’s credibility to society at large, but to family most of all. “You promised you’d be there for us” careens around the minds of so many who are locked away, and now feel they’ve forced their families into highly inconvenient, often entirely unmanageable visitation schedules (not to mention the financial hardship leveed onto now-single-income households). Relationships can deteriorate into the worst kind of long-distance, pay-phone management routines. Their kids grow up through periodic visits behind glass, with unfettered theories about the “type of person” their father or mother is. Physical contact is stymied. And when it comes to re-establishing a sliver of new credibility in the eyes of their family, often the only tools left to someone in prison are words said or written.
When building a curriculum or program designed to help the incarcerated, omission of family considerations is a surefire way to limit its effectiveness. Particularly for programming that is rightly intended to be rehabilitative in nature, many lingering internal conflicts and reasons forbeing in prison in the first place are tied up with trouble at home. Prisoners need help from trained social workers to constructively re-engage their families, for the sake of everyone involved. And knowing they had family on their side would make the time inside—even for those sentenced to life without parole—considerably more worthwhile and productive.
4. A Sense of Purpose
In working on behalf of thousands of prisoners—from minimum to maximum security facilities—it became abundantly clear to me that while there were a range of emotions about why they were in prison, they still wanted to make the most of their time inside. Whether it was studying for TABE or GED tests, training to become a welder or barber, or simply reading for the first time in years—the desire for sources of motivation was near-universal. To caveat, there are some seriously troubled individuals who need mental health support to a much greater-than-average degree who fall in the category of “hard to help”, but the vast majority of incarcerated individuals want to (a) spend their time effectively and, in doing so, (b) prepare themselves to spend their time even more effectively after prison.
In an in-depth study of 129 convicted adult males in prison, McMurran et al. lays out a “goal-based” approach in evaluating the mindset of incarcerated individuals:
“Recently, positive approaches to offender rehabilitation, focusing upon offenders’ strengths, have gained prominence. Proponents have criticized existing rehabilitation models as focusing too much on offenders’ deficits. Goal perspectives, which provide a structure for therapy, may unite these two approaches. The Personal Concerns Inventory: Offender Adaptation (PCI:OA) is a semi-structured interview that identifies offenders’ current concerns or goals. The goals identified by a sample of 129 convicted adult male prisoners are reported here. A range of positive, anti-criminal goals were expressed, including stopping offending, improving self-control, finding and keeping jobs, having stable accommodation, quitting drink and drugs, changing support networks, and finding new leisure pursuits. Furthermore, prisoners expressed life-enhancing goals, such as improving their lifestyle, gaining work experience, having good family relationships, gaining skills, and getting fit and healthy. The PCI:OA may prove useful as a motivational procedure, a basis for developing positive, goal-focused interventions, and a tool for outcome evaluation.”
The fact that this was studied at all is a sign of progress. In my own first-hand experience, this desire of life-enhancement manifests more like a bursting-at-the-seams, sometimes desperate-sounding plea of “I just want to be better—please help me to be better.” The attitudes academized in this study are explicitly asked for by incarcerated individuals nationwide, and very likely latent in many more.
5. Good Time—A Faster Second Chance
“Good time” refers to the time someone in prison can “make back” by exhibiting continually reputable behavior during their sentence. In many cases, this results in individuals reducing their sentence ~50% in many states. With a cynical eye, one line of argument might claim that (1)-(4) above is fluff, and “all a prisoner really wants is to get out as quickly as possible”—so they’ll just find whatever means they can to get their sentence reduced. I’d contend that getting out and restarting one’s life isn’t all that bad of a goal to begin with (it effectively functions as a promotion), and aiming for good time has a desire for purpose, family, dignity and financial well-being all wrapped up in it.
Many prison re-training programs, especially those that are more established, come with the added benefit of good time upon completion. Some common buckets of programming are “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” (CBT), “Fatherhood Guidance” (many with quasi-religious bends), “Substance Abuse”, “TABE/GED Training”, and a variety of vocations. Even if someone had a purely sentence-reducing focus upon entering a CBT-oriented program, they would still be asked to confront some seriously difficult issues simply by showing up to class. Talking through why you’ve been incarcerated, your personal life, and where you come from are extremely difficult topics to broach, particularly for a subset of the population with substantial mental health issues. Moreover, these programs are typically designed with the intent of changing “unproductive modes of reasoning”; in other words, those who are incarcerated will be asked to work through difficult scenarios—and do so with unfamiliar mental tools for reasoning through those scenarios. In-prison programs of the educational or vocational variety, at the very least, could help improve an enrollee’s skillsets, ostensibly offering them a greater chance of success post-parole. There are a host of problems with in-prison training programs, but the main point here is that one would be hard-pressed to dissociate entirely someone’s desire for good time from the other items on this list. So long as it remains legal, the potential for reducing one’s sentence will remain a major consideration for incarcerated individuals—and one that should be designed for by policymakers and decision-makers across all sectors.
Solving for Incarceration
Historically, innovation and the prison system have rarely been used in the same sentence without a bit of comedy nearby. But for those starting to build something meaningful through public, private or non-profit means, they’ve done so with a combination of the above needs in mind. Just a few months backs, American Prison Data Systems (APDS) raised $5 million for its Series B to distribute tablets for prisoners preparing for their GED and expanding their educational potential. There have been a number of marginal innovations over the past decade, but nothing that’s managed to stick has neglected the importance of good time, family, financial well-being, purpose and dignity.
Come to think of it – our needs aren’t all that different, are they?
