Prison Industry Series

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine by Joel Dyer, 2000, Excerpts

“Prisonization” is a term used to describe the central truth of prison life – namely, that in order to survive in prison, an inmate must comply with prison-society structure above all else. Behavioral scientists refer to the unwritten rules that govern this violent prison structure as the “prisoner code,” and they have found that the life-or-death pressure to live by this code is far more powerful than any other force behind prison walls, including efforts at reform.

Sexual assaults, race wars, extortion, rival-gang conflicts, guard abuse, random violence, and the demand for absolute loyalty to an inmate’s fellow prisoners are all factors in the prisonization effect. Prison is a place where survival quickly becomes the only thing that matters. It is nearly impossible for an inmate to make rehabilitation a priority under such stressful conditions.

In America, thousands of men and women who have been thrown into the prison environment for minor nonviolent offenses such as drug use have been forced to choose between being a victim of rape, beatings, extortion, and murder or becoming a rapist, batterer, extortionist, or murderer. Many have chosen the latter because their instinct to survive made it a rational choice.

Many of those released will exhibit some behavior resulting from their prisonization scars such as alcohol and drug abuse, wife and child battery, rape, or an overall escalation in their willingness to use violence as a first resort.

The longer a prison corporation holds an inmate, the more money the company makes. The worse they do the job of reforming the inmate, the more likely the prisoner will continue to recidivate and produce future profits for the company. This backward system has turned the prisonization effect into a windfall, a valuable process that transforms prisoners serving a short sentence into annuities.

Inmates who receive frequent visits and support from parents, spouses, and children are much more likely to make it on the outside once released. When jurisdictions ship inmates halfway across the country to a private prison, this reform-aiding family support is destroyed. Since the vast majority of prisoners are from low-income demographic groups, their families cannot possibly afford to travel great distances to maintain this vital contact. After years of being held in out-of-state private prisons, many inmates are returned to their home-state facilities or are released only to find that their loved ones have remarried or no longer desire to maintain contact. Once this occurs, the chances that someone else will eventually be victimized by the inmate are increased dramatically.

Reversing such trends will not be easy, considering factors such as recidivism and the increased odds that the children of a prisoner will turn to crime themselves someday due to their having been raised in a one-parent home in poverty, as most are.