Prisons and Sustainability

What does the food served inside an American prison tell us about the society outside of it?

In this episode of Sustainability Time, we begin with incarceration and follow the question much further. We examine prison food and punishment in the extraordinary human environment created when large numbers of people with very different histories, offenses and needs are confined together.

We also confront the difficult question that can get lost in criticism of mass incarceration: if we substantially change the system, what do we do for and with the people already inside it? Some have been institutionalized for decades. Some have been profoundly harmed. Some have profoundly harmed others. Some may remain dangerous. Others may be capable of returning to society and contributing to it. Reform has to deal honestly with all of them.

But prison doesn't exist separately from society. Our journey takes us through childhood development, abuse, mental health, housing, food access, healthcare, poverty, homelessness, employment and economic insecurity. We consider the role that chronic survival fear can play in people's lives—and what happens when society waits until human problems have become extraordinarily difficult and expensive before seriously addressing them.

Along the way, we question something even larger: how does society determine value? If our economic and political systems count the cost of helping someone but fail to count the cost of allowing that person's human capacity to deteriorate, perhaps our accounting is incomplete.

Real life doesn't arrive in separate categories. Neither do the causes and consequences of incarceration.

This is a conversation about punishment and compassion, victims and offenders, responsibility and development, fear and freedom—and ultimately about what a sustainable society should be trying to produce in its people.

Because perhaps the purpose of corrections shouldn't simply be deciding how long someone must remain behind a wall.

Perhaps it should also be helping a human being find their way back.

Transcript

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A Bigger Meaning Of Sustainability

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Sustainability Time Podcast, the podcast where we endeavor to challenge reality. We endeavor to say that we do deserve, we can function in the reality in the future that we deserve, which is a healthy one. Real life doesn't arrive in separate categories. We separate it. We have environmental policy over here, economic policy over there, criminal justice somewhere else, health care gets another department, education gets another budget, housing gets another agency, mental health gets another program. Then we wonder why we have trouble understanding the whole thing. Sustainability itself gets reduced to a checklist pretty quickly. Recycle more, waste less, drive a little smarter. Those things matter, but I think sustainability asks a much bigger question. What are we building a society to do and who gets to thrive inside it? Because if sustainability is really about our ability to continue, to remain healthy, resilient, constructive, and alive, then we have to consider more than our beautiful trees, more than our beautiful oceans. We have to consider us the people, communities, relationships, institutions, the natural world. So I want to follow some connections that aren't always obvious. Obvious connections aren't always connections. So let's start.

Prison Food And Human Dignity

SPEAKER_00 2:12

I was looking at incarceration in America recently. I started thinking about food. Not nutrition, food. There's a difference. I was talking with someone who had spent time incarcerated, maybe almost a decade. Professional guy now earns good money, gives back to the community. We both understand what the other means by good food. We agree on this. You don't have to be that difficult. A decent burger is a decent burger. A good slice of pizza is a good slice of pizza. When we come around to talking about prison food, the word he used was indescribable. Have you ever thought of how bad bad food has to be before you use such a word as that? Indescribable. Initially, the first thing I thought was are they doing this intentionally? They are they producing bad food on purpose to keep the inmates down. Enjoyment is a euphoria. Satisfaction is another type of euphoria. Maybe the institution doesn't assign much value to whether the food is enjoyable. It's not one of the stated goals of feeding inmates. You have being fed, and then there's having a meal. Think about having a meal. You smell something good cooking. Maybe somebody sprinkled a little love in there. You sit down, you talk, you laugh, you eat slowly, maybe you eat too much. Maybe you save something for later. Food is nutrition, certainly, but food is also culture, memory, family, pleasure, choice, hospitality, celebration, comfort. So granted, you have a set of serious challenges trying to run prisons. Suppose you're running one, you have hundreds of thousands, hundreds or thousands of people confined together. Some have committed extraordinarily serious crimes, some have severe mental health problems, some have histories of trauma, some are impulsive, some are addicted, some are manipulative, some are frightened, some are aggressive, some are simply trying to get through their sentence without trouble. Four to six percent of inmates are innocent of what they have been accused. You have officers who have to go home safely every night, and you have budgets, you have contraband. Where am I going with this?

Boundaries Versus Deprivation In Prison

SPEAKER_00 5:40

You have to manage human behavior if you're involved in management of a prison. You have security, contraband, fights, gang relationships, power struggles, and you have to manage human behavior. But being humane or being inhumane doesn't make those realities disappear. Doesn't make those challenges disappear. Kindness without boundaries can be exploited. Consistency matters, expectations matter, institutional order matters. But there's an enormous difference between maintaining boundaries with authority and using deprivation to achieve some sort of goal. You don't miss the sun quite as much if you've never seen it, some might say. Is prison management producing compliance this way? What qualities are we trying to develop? Imagine what an inmate sentenced to a long sentence. What challenges you've both faced you've both have faced in the last ten years? How have you learned to communicate? How have you learned whom to trust? How have you learned how to manage conflict in these last ten years? What about the technology that you've losed, used, learned? How about your work expectations, relationships, money, boundaries? How to behave when you're angry? Have you improved in that area? When to tell somebody what you're actually feeling? When to shut up, when to apologize, how to ask for help, how to recognize when someone else needs it. Now in that same ten years, think of a list of skills you might not have improved while the inmate has. You may have become extraordinarily good at reading people as an inmate. You might become very good at hiding vulnerability. You might be very good at saying exactly what somebody needs to hear. Maybe you become a masterclass liar. Maybe you learn strategic silence. Maybe you learn that trusting the wrong person is dangerous. Maybe you learn that admitting fear is dangerous. Maybe you learn that appearing weak is dangerous. Maybe you learn that certain kinds of aggression solves problems. Maybe you've learned how to be absolutely invisible or manipulate. Maybe you've learned how to be absolutely invisible or how to manipulate others or strike fear in others, or improve your ability to handle yourself in a fight. Those may be extremely useful skills in one environment, and then one morning somebody opens a gate. You're free.

Skills Prison Teaches For Survival

SPEAKER_00 10:06

We want you to tell the truth when telling the truth makes you uncomfortable. We want you to plan five years ahead. We want you to become a successful citizen. We want you to obey the law. Make positive contributions, be thankful for opportunities, learn to fear and have faith in God, and always remain teachable. Now let's let's step back from this for a second. What if our justice system were to change the wording for how a judge says to someone convicted of a crime? Imagine hearing a judge say, I hereby sentence you to five years in which your liberty will be restricted while you find your way. You're hereby challenged by this court to form the beginnings of a constructive life. People sometimes do lose their way. There are people right now becoming soaked in destructive ways of thinking and behaving, deception, domination, suspicion, addiction, impulsivity, cruelty, violence, me first survival thinking. Society produces people with limitations, all of us. Everybody learns limitations, good ones, healthy ones, ones that inspire us to work well together and work to grow to be prosperous with the guidance formed by convictions and ethical codes. Child doesn't wake up one morning at eighteen with the fully developed ability to navigate society. We build that ability. Families help build it, schools help build it, neighborhoods help build it, healthcare helps build it, friends help build it, mentors help build it. I love the phrase it takes a village to raise a child. Stable homes build emotional security. Stable homes build your ability to navigate society. A stable home helps you build the ability to navigate society. So does nutrition. So does safety. And when enough of these things fail or are not present, we shouldn't be shocked that some adults arrive in society poorly equipped to navigate it.

Families Living With The Fallout

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Visualize the prison environment. Imagine fifteen out of every one hundred people living around you had killed someone. Imagine another fifteen out of a hundred people living around you had assaulted someone sexually. Imagine how a mother must feel about that for their child. Heartbroken, angry, terrified, ashamed. Maybe she's exhausted. Maybe she's been dealing with this for fifteen years or more. Maybe she loves her son more than anything in the world. Maybe she's afraid of him. Tears. All these things can coexist. I love you. I don't want you hurt. I hate what you did. I cannot let you live in my house. I'm frightened of you. I hope you change. I'm relieved to know where you are tonight. The only chance he has to stay alive is to be there in prison. Think about the emotional complexity of that. There are sons and daughters in this environment. There are parents, there are victims, there are victims' families in this environment, there are neighborhoods, there are police, officers of the court, correctional officers, probation officers, social workers, all people involved in education, spiritual and support networks. And the consequences of all this activity radiates outwards. These people have the first level links to our criminal justice system. The devil is the fact the fact that political incentives that reward politicians for sounding tougher than their opponent on crime are rewarding.

Reform Promises And People Still Inside

SPEAKER_00 15:19

But suppose tomorrow America says we're going to change. We shorten excessive sentences, we improve local economies, we improve our ability, we improve our interest in investing in local economies. We improve in investing earlier in local economies. We expand treatment for addiction. We improve schools, we build housing, we reform policing, we reduce unnecessary pretrial detention, we improve parole. So now what? We're on our way, right? But there are still human beings sitting in those prisons today. Some have been there twenty years, thirty years. Some entered at nineteen and are now fifty. Some have serious psychiatric disorders, some are addicted. Some have become institutionalized and returned to prison. Some have families waiting for them. Some have nobody, some have changed enormously, some haven't. Some are dangerous, some aren't. Some have become interested in what the future may bring. Hallelujah. Maybe some of them, maybe some will never present a serious danger to anyone. Some may remain in crisis in one of many kinds, one of many forms, despite everything an enlightened society can reasonably offer. We cannot construct a better plan for a more enlightened public and an enlightened criminal justice system without spending effort developing a sustainable support environment for those who are in prison right now. But

Sustainability As Human Development

SPEAKER_00 17:38

if the United States has seven percent of the world's population and holds twenty-five percent of the world's prison population, then we have to face something. This issue may be the biggest crisis and problem for long-term stability, for long-term sustainability that there is. It's an ethical crisis on someone's part. We'll never lead ourselves to an improved consciousness as a society until this problem is embraced. A society interested in sustainability has to be fascinated with human development, not merely rescuing people when something has gone catastrophically wrong. A sustainable society can offer so much to us emotionally. The greatest, most sustaining fruit we have to offer is ourselves. A sustainable society can bring all of us to a place where our future is simply better. So today, in these times, how does a child learn emotional regulation? How does somebody learn that anger doesn't require violence? How do you learn trust? How do you learn patience? How do you learn that tomorrow matters? How do you learn that another human being's feelings matter? How do you learn healthy sexuality? How do you learn boundaries? How do you learn to recover from rejection? How do you learn that you can fail without being destroyed? These are social resources. And when a person doesn't develop these social resources as a child, so many children, society and individuals may face consequences much later, sometimes at the door of a prison gate.

The Closing Question We Carry Forward

SPEAKER_00 20:07

The larger question, what is the larger question behind sustainability? It's not how do we preserve the world exactly as it is? It's what are we trying to make possible? What kind of people do we want to become? What kind of relationships do we wish to have? What kind of communities do we wish to live in? What kind of institutions do we want to support and guide us? What kind of future do we want to obtain? Sustainability is not a destination we reach and put up a sign. It's a way of evaluating what we're building. Perhaps one of the simplest tests are does what we're building increase the constructive vitality of life, our life? How about communities? How about institutions? How about the natural world? How about the generations to come after us? That's a much larger definition of sustainability than recycling, bless us all, green friends. And we have to push that for us all. We need a larger definition because real life doesn't arrive as a singularity, it arrives in separate categories, different places. Thank you for joining me on sustainability time. Take some time to think about your definition of sustainability. I'd love for you to carry that question with you today. What are we trying to sustain? And maybe a better question what are we trying to help grow? It is ourselves. So this is Todd Francis from Sustainability Time. We'll see you next time.