​Fixing our prisons

In yesterday’s editorial, we offered advice for activists who protested a Greek mixer last Friday and for the students looking onwards and listening. Unfortunately, as the post-protest discussion over social media has demonstrated, the aggressive nature of the demonstration stole attention away from the issue being protested—the state of prisoners’ rights and treatment, particularly in Durham.

One pressing matter regarding prisoner treatment has to do with the unusually strict schedules imposed upon detainees at Durham County Jail. In the past year, the jail instituted a lock-back policy that heavily restricted the amount of time inmates could spend outside of the confinement of their cell or jailhouse workplace. Under the lock-back policy, a large number of inmates was limited to a single two-hour window of free time every other day. After leaving the jail, many of those inmates described how the lock-back policy left them struggling to readjust to the outside world. Other inmates talked about how the unbearable seclusion of lock-back had worsened suicidal thoughts. Although the Durham County Jail has noted that it reports all suicides to the State Bureau of Investigation, it has no policy for reporting attempted suicides, and the large population of the jail means that available mental healthcare is often insufficient. The lock-back policy at Durham County Jail has been a focal point for protesters who claim that prison conditions are violations of human rights.

Additionally, questions have arisen after recent deaths at the Durham County Jail. According to critics, jail officers are allegedly negligent or slow in responding to prisoner requests for health assistance and fail to fulfill their basic job of keeping prisoners safe for at least a subset of inmates.

Considering the litany of serious problems in both the Durham Jail and national prison system, it is unfortunate that Friday’s protest distracted from the prison issue itself with shouting matches and unfounded accusations of illegal prisoner experimentation. It is further a shame that false analogies to the Holocaust were used to advance the position of protesters and instead backfired on the issues. While experiments are conducted on prisoners, the research requires consent and all the same IRB approval processes as the studies we see advertised on campus.

It is altogether too easy to forget that just a couple minutes outside the Duke bubble, if a person is arrested, Durham County Jail is where they will end up. Even for those who do not share protester’s sympathetic motivations for taking up their cause, an ethos of analytic reasoning should still lead to the conclusion that the mistreatment of citizens by their government is unacceptable. Though incarcerated inmates have violated some law, they live in a country in which citizens are endowed with certain protections and ought to be kept safe by officers of that law whether they reside inside or outside of jail.

The way forward is already being paved: locally, advocates for rights have been moving against the lock-back policy for nearly a year and nationally, consciousness is developing to consider the problem of mass incarceration. In order to maintain progress however, substantial discussion on prisoners’ rights and incarceration will need to take place, and for that to occur, every faction of the debate will have to make a contribution. Officers will need to work on ridding themselves of their negative reputation in certain communities; activists will need to put their cause ahead of their emotions and make as clear-headed a case as possible; the rest of us—Duke students, American citizens and all bystanders—will need to face uncomfortable truths and engage in civil conversations to work toward solutions.