1st
Prison, garbage, death and choice
Pictured: Rainer Werner Fassbinder — a gay, crazier Joaquin Phoenix of the past
There’s a Fassbinder movie where one of the characters is “on the lam” and hides from the police in an abandoned prison.
Once I read that, I realized this was the green shoot for a new system of punishment that combines the need to keep criminals from continuing to harm others with a desire to assuage the guilt which results from usurping someone’s freedom.
I imagine that most of the suffering caused by prison is the lack of choice the prisoner has in everything he does. Our lives are conducted through choice, even obligations are chosen to be undertaken through some sense of duty to whatever is forcing us to do something we’d rather not (community, financial condition, etc).
So I’ve come up with two new kinds of punishment centered around removing the most inhumane aspect of mainstream correctional institutions.
1. Allowing someone to believe they are hiding from police when they are in fact inprisoned. As I said before, this would remove the dangerous offender from society while allowing him to believe he is the master of his own destiny. All the frustration and negative feedback cycles inherent to prisons’ removing of inmates’ freedoms would disappear, as the prisoner struggled to remain free and survive in his hiding place.
A complex network of underground caves, or a similarly attractive structure to someone who is on the run, could be constructed, and the prisoner steered into it by pursuing police. Each network of caves would have a certain capacity of “runaways” it could sustain, who would be free to meet each other and believe that the others are simply on the run as well.
They would be allowed to form an underground society and form runaway families, all while thinking they have simply found the best hiding place in the world. The rest of civilization would have a place to throw its felons, crooks and thugs (and the female equivalents), keeping them from endangering the world outside, without depriving them of the basic right to freedom and choice.
2. A new death penalty structure where no specific date of death is given, and capital punishment is executed during sleep. Here, a prisoner would be told that he had been sentenced to execution. However, instead of a cinematic walk down the Green mile, agonizing last meal choice between curly fries or lobster squash nut borscht, and months of insomnia and anxiety over what lies on the other side, the prisoner would simply be told — sometime in the next 5 years, you will go to bed on a normal day and never wake up. He would share the right of having an uncertain date of death, a benefit everyone else, even people who will live shorter lives than said prisoner, gets to enjoy.
“Holy shit, I know the exact date, time and cause of my own future death! If only it could be uncertain as it is for everyone else on the planet…”
Whether this would be integrated with the underground network of faux-runaway tunnels or not is another issue, as informing the prisoner of his sentence would destroy the illusion of freedom. But assuming a normal prison structure, this would be a great way of reducing anxiety and stress. Everyone I’ve talked to about this idea thinks it’s equivalent to torturing the prisoner before executing them, as they would become sleep deprived, constantly waiting for the night in which male nurses would burst into their room and inject them with potassium nitride.
But they would get used to it. People get used to everything. It’s much better to accept an eventual event that’ll happen in the next 1-5 years, and try to build some kind of routine around that thought, than to struggle with a looming and approaching deadline that only gets closer with every day. I’m sure prisoners on death row think of nothing but death and dying, while prisoner in my death row would eventually get bored with waiting for an uncertain date and try to live a balance life.
(Note: It has been brought to my attention that the death sentence is already kind of like this — due to the possibility of appeals, the length of processing times and bureaucracy in general, most prisoners on death row spend most of their time waiting in uncertainty, in jail for years not knowing when their date will be set.
My point is that this should be institutionalized — the prisoner’s time spent in uncertainty is even worse than the time he spends waiting for the given date. The uncertainty described above allows the prisoner to believe that he might live, giving him hope and exacerbating his pain if he loses his appeals.
In my system, only once he is in fact convicted would he be given the 5 year timeline of dying at any time during his sleep. Then he will be certain that he will die, but he won’t have to agonize over a specific date like other prisoners do when their own date is set, even if they do spend some time in a different kind of uncertainty.)
