PRISONER EXPRESS

Now I'm sure that the government has spent massive amounts of our tax cash and tax credit funding hundreds of psychologists, etc, to tell it something useful about the reading habits of the near illiterate. Likewise, I am certain that such richly-paid professionals were and are determined to find something useful for the government to make of these studies, if for no other reason than to foment the purchase of more studies.

But consider this: of the thousands of libraries in each of the thousands of American prisons, each and every one of them is nothing but a pimple on the wart of the education department that dangles precariously from the massive ass of a security apparatus determined to provide only two services: escape-proof cages within which millions of persons can be held captive as long as possible for the yearly taxpayer-paid profit that can be made off them, and, the creation of a loyal, pro-government voting block to watch the captives and vote for any legislation the government chooses to enact.

Libraries are a recent addition to prisons and would not even exist if it were not for the pretense made toward humane treatment of captives. Society and politicians could not care less whether captives read or not, and prison bureaucrats only grudgingly permit space for libraries so as to look as if they have something to do with the word so recently claimed in their titles: "corrections." As a result of this attitude, only fake, mock, or inadequate libraries exist within American prisons.

We all want the cops to get good information while illegally spying on us citizens. The information cops get from spying on inmate reading habits is anemic because so few of us can read, and sub-par in quality because we who can read are limited to books that are mere fiction/entertainment nonsense. What these suspicious, inquisitive cops could do to improve the worth of their data streams is this: teach these idiots how to read; give them something of quantity to read; stop preventing us from obtaining our own literature to read; give us some incentive to read.

This may sound like a huge burden to ask our poor, over-worded, underpaid cops and guards to shoulder, but it actually entails relieving them of work. A better-educated inmate will compete in the workforce, relieving cops of the burden of abducting him for more cage-time. Relieving themselves from censoring inmate reading material will tell them more precisely whether an inmate is determined to continue to perform outlawed acts and which outlawed acts he is intending to perform. Also, tons of educative materials are thrown away in America daily that would have been donated to prisons except for the prison bureaucrats' refusal to accept it. Further, inmates would be deliriously happy to learn skills and pass tests in prison if they were merely rewarded with a few months off their always-excessive sentences. (Bureaucrats do pay lip-service to this idea by offering, for example, a paltry 90 days off one's sentence for completion of a GED, and mere days off for lesser programs, but these gains are exceedingly small plus they are swiftly yanked away by guards who get "disrespected" when they prevent captives' access to showers, clothes, the law library, and other services.) The uselessness of these two competing systems of giving and taking away time off captives' sentences is easily seen when compared. The most that a captive can get off his sentence is 90 days, one time, for a GED. The least that is taken away by guards for petty infractions such as cursing once is 60 days, and the usual time-theft intervals are 90, 180, & 365 days. Obviously there is very little incentive to participate in any prison programs when the primary reason for taking them is so easily and often removed after completion. Program effectiveness could be easily raised considerably merely by making this time off one's sentence permanently safe from removal by the guards.

If persons with the authority of law wished to get really progressive, they could institute a program of skill improvement. This would be similar to government and educational programs already in use that allow "auditing" college classes. It would entail little more than putting educative books in the library for prisoners to read and study. When they felt they had self-taught themselves enough, they would individually be permitted to take a test. If they master the test, they get x amount of time off their sentence.

Everyone profits from such a system as this, it costs virtually nothing because the books are free, and the prisoncrats' time and effort is minimized by letting the captives do most of the work. We more educated captives teach the less-educated ones how to form study groups and work together toward a common goal of learning something useful, and the citizens get back people who have a more positive attitude toward society and who are more able to compete for employment. This is what the cops like to call the "force multiplier effect." This is what they think they're doing by having inmates give them lists of what books prisoners check out at their prison libraries. Providing captives with incentives to learn useful skills is much more efficient and no more costly.