Tomorrow, the Legislature will hold a hearing on a bill to impose a five-year moratorium on the construction of new prisons and jails.
This is particularly urgent because the state wants to spend 50 million dollars to build a new prison to house just over 100 women, most of whom are safe to release to their homes and families.
This bill is personal because for the last five years I have been visiting a friend in prison, and I have watched with horror what prisons are really like and what they do to a person. My friend has endured torture unlike anything you can imagine — four years in solitary confinement, starvation, and assaults. The prisons here in Massachusetts are brutal, nightmarish places. As a system and institution for rehabilitation, they simply do not work.
Please submit testimony in support of a prison construction moratorium.
The state says this new facility will be different — it will be a “trauma-informed” prison. But, in visiting Andrew over the last five years, I have learned that there is no such thing as a trauma-informed prison because when a person has no autonomy or freedom in their life and when other human beings have complete and total control over them, there can be no progress towards rehabilitation and no healing from past trauma. We have an opportunity to use this five-year moratorium to reimagine rehabilitation. It costs less to send someone to Harvard then it does to keep someone imprisoned in our state. Think of how much money we could save, how many people could be healed if we were putting that $50,000,000 into education, into therapy, into affordable housing, or even just into food to feed hungry babies.
Please submit testimony in support of a prison construction moratorium.
Every time I visited my friend, I would look at the sign on Cedar Junction’s waiting room that said the goal of the prison was rehabilitation. Sometimes when I read that sign, I would laugh at the absurdity of it, sometimes I would cry at the false promise of it. Massachusetts has an opportunity to think outside the box. We can come up with another alternative for treating people — people who have harmed others and themselves. But inflicting cruel punishment and torture does not make anyone safer. Instead we can approach solving this problem with true compassion and real rehabilitation.
PS: For more information, check out this helpful toolkit from Families for Justice as Healing, Building up People Not Prisons, and the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.
