Pen Pals

December 2002

Turn to the back of this magazine and you’ll find dozens of personal ads from prisoners. And every month hundreds of readers respond to these ads, marking them as some of the most popular ads in the personals section.

From time to time, we get a letter or call from a reader upset that his prisoner penpal turned out not to be the lean 28-year-old advertised, or that he was asking for money, or that he was actually incarcerated for life and thus unlikely ever to be able to share in the romantic dreams outlined in his letters. Often these disgruntled readers suggest that we segregate prisoner ads so that personals readers will be warned they are writing an inmate. Others go further and urge that we refuse ads from prisoners all together; why would any decent person want to be in touch with low-life cons?

Many people who’d quickly condemn discrimination against individuals based on race or religion or ethnicity, nonetheless feel it okay to judge someone because he’s in prison. And there is some logic to such sentiment: frequently, prisoners are serving time for distinctly anti-social and harmful behavior, conduct that does not recommend them as friends, fuck buddies, or lovers.

But many are in prison unfairly. A majority of federal prisoners are serving time for non-violent drug offenses, and thousands more are locked up for non-violent sex “crimes.” And many of those incarcerated, for whatever reason, would be free were they not poor, unable to buy the legal representation needed to avoid jail.

The fact that prisons are populated through capricious enforcement of unjust laws is certainly a good reason to be wary of discriminating against any given prisoner. Many citizens engage in some conduct that, though not harmful to anyone, is technically criminal. Most remain free while others are jailed only because of arbitrary and inequitable application of the law. Anyone who’s ever smoked a joint or enjoyed gay (or other consensual, but illegal) sex is a potential prisoner. If they are also poor, the chances they’ll wind up in prison skyrocket.

But even were the criminal justice system more equitable and our laws more just, it would still be foolhardy to imagine we could divide the world into good people who deserve freedom and bad people who merit condemnation. The legitimate target of the law is harmful action, not “evil” people. Incarceration can only be moral if it aims to prevent, deter, or correct genuinely harmful actions. If it instead seeks to vengefully brand some as worthy of maltreatment, incarceration becomes an exercise in scapegoating.

Anyone who labels prisoners “bad,” condemning the person instead of the crime, misses the fundamental point that within all of us exists a complex set of motivations. It is a hallmark of human psychology that many people, uncomfortable with their own darker impulses, seek to identify such traits in others. These others are then judged to be so bad that they have nothing in common with “good” people. Thus, many try to absolve their own moral shortcomings by imagining that since they are obviously not one of those bad people, they must be good.

Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King all spent time in prison, castigated by the “good” people of their day as dangerous evil doers. Ironically, all were in prison for their struggle to free their societies from the destructive notion that the world could be divided up into the good and clean people loved by God, and the bad and dirty people forsaken by God.

Of course, being in prison doesn’t make one morally superior. But neither does it mark one as morally inferior. Like all of us, prisoners will continue to be faced with choices in their lives. And like us, they will make better, more productive decisions when treated not as pariahs but as part of the human family.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=B129951C-51A3-4281-895D7B289FC918D4>