Link for full article: The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction.
This is one of many reasons why BOP stands for “Backwards on Purpose” in the prison community: Even before this ruling made it worse for selected individuals, challenging your conviction or sentence was pretty much a justice-free process. 😢
Great article. The institutionalization of our population is messed up and sad.
Especially when the victims of it haven’t done nearly enough to be locked up. And the ones who have are just products of their time and place, more often than not.
Yeah. Or they never did it in the first place, and even if they can prove it, they can’t get out. It’s like a nightmare.
So I read a book by a well-intentioned guy who was working in the prison system. He talked about one inmate who was a model prisoner, just this good kid, and everyone on the staff would scream at him and shit on him constantly. The author was horrified, and so he treated him with kindness, and he all of a sudden started causing problems: Cursing and talking back, starting fights, refusing to do his work. The author started yelling at him, took away his privileges, and all of a sudden he turned into a model prisoner again. But if he got privileges, he turned bad. Basically what the author figured out was that you had to yell at him, talk to him like a dirtbag, and he’d be polite and compliant. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. The guy was so good-natured when people were shitting on him that by every human instinct you wanted to treat him with kindness and decency, but somehow you couldn’t, or he’d turn into a nightmare.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it either, so I told that story to someone who’s more familiar with that life. He explained it to me in one sentence: He thinks he’s a piece of shit, and he deserves it.
It opened up this whole new area of darkness about the whole system for me. 😢
You may be interested in a story I’m working on, it’s about my short journey thru the legal system. I have it posted in my “community”
What you’ve described I’ve experienced myself, and it is eye opening to say the least, about human nature. I didn’t do hard time, some might consider it no time at all.
So far I have 4 chapters done, the first part is build up and context, but I’m slowly finding my voice.
This is a topic I feel very strongly about, and usually I’m not one to take a stand, but the experience has made me more active for a better tomorrow in some small way.
Dystopian as fuck.
