The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Both pleaded guilty. Both cited, and were treated for, serious mental health disorders in connection with their crimes. Neither is speaking out now to make excuses for their behavior or to rehabilitate their reputations. They got what they deserved, they say.

But they also say that Minnesota and the nation deserve a better corrections system -- not so much for the sake of the inmates as for the communities to which they will return.

I'll let them elaborate:

Borden: Almost everybody gets out. That's the reality of the prison system. Do [inmates] get out better, or worse? Almost every component of the system is designed to send them out worse than when they went in.

Amundson: There's a lot of learning that goes on in prison. I've never so much as smoked a marijuana cigarette in my life. But I can tell you three or four different ways to cook meth, where to get the material, where the best fields are in southern Minnesota to cook it. I can tell you where to sell it in Minneapolis and St. Paul, what the going price is. I can tell you a lot about what the best weed is to buy, how to take ink off of bank notes, how alarm systems are disabled. I've never had a single conversation about any of this, mind you. I just sat at dinner and listened.

Very, very little rehabilitation goes on. At Lino Lakes, supposedly the principal drug and alcohol treatment facility in Minnesota, the so-called treatment is almost universally considered a joke.

Borden: I have, for more than 30 years, said public service is a high calling. What I saw in terms of the federal prison staff was a group of cynical, burned-out people. If they were paid the same rate I was paid as an inmate, 12 cents an hour, they would have been overpaid. There wasn't one that demonstrated the kind of work ethic that you would want an inmate to duplicate on the outside.

Amundson: I knew some very good people on staff, but they were trying to run a clean sewer. Prison is an atmosphere of cynicism, anxiety and bitterness.

The worst is what happens in the visiting room, when you have employees who are completely insensitive to family matters. They care nothing about keeping families together. They were abusive to my kids [he has four school-age sons] and abusive of me in front of my kids. How many times my kids left there with tears, I can't tell you. How do you come back out and resume your role as a father, after that?

We used to think that the juvenile justice system fed the adult system. In fact, the adult justice system feeds the juvenile system. When a father is in jail, his children are seven times more likely than other kids to land in prison.

Borden: Ninety-five percent of the inmates, the men, leave divorced. This system destroys families. It begins with the fact that we have urban prisoners serving in rural areas, miles away from home.

Amundson: Prisoners who work make 12 cents an hour, and from Lino Lakes it costs 38 cents a minute to call home. How can families stay in contact?

Borden: About that work -- at Yankton, it was makework. It's cleaning tables three times a day. It's nothing that would prepare you for a job.

Amundson: The Minnesota statutes provide for something called "productive day," that allows prisoners on minimum [security] to leave, under supervision, and go to work somewhere. But the staff discourages it. By the commissioner's fiat, it's only available the last eight months of sentences. The Legislature intended for half of sentences to be served on work release.

We don't need any more prisons in this state. You could empty out the prisons, and put these people on work release. They'd be paying their own way, earning a wage, paying taxes, and staying with their families. They could be monitored with electronic surveillance.

Borden: If you want to talk about a crime, it's the economic robbery of the taxpayer by locking up thousands of people who are of no threat to anyone. ... We have 734 of every 100,000 Americans in prison today. That's more than Stalin had in Russia at the height of the gulag system. The question is, are we safer because of it?

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Readers, that's a good and timely question. Minnesota's incarceration rate, long one of the lowest in the country, is now rising rapidly. Gov. Tim Pawlenty is asking the 2006 Legislature to authorize a $70 million bond sale to pay for new, improved and expanded prison facilities.

That's a worthwhile expenditure if it buys a safer society and puts broken lives back on productive tracks. But if that money is spent on more of what Win and Rollie describe, it will yield neither safety nor redemption. Legislators should be demanding better results.

http://www.startribune.com/314/story/225221.html