Incarceration Nations: On the Dangers of Exporting US Prison Systems
While issues of mass incarceration have become part of the United States' national discourse, we discuss less how the exportation of the US prison system has impacted countries abroad. It is for this reason that Baz Dreisinger, a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, sets out to understand prisons globally. InIncarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, Dreisinger exposes us to the varied forms of criminal punishment and restorative justice measures enacted in nine countries.
During her travels, Dreisinger meets with prisoners and local community members leading prison-based arts programs in Jamaica and participates in restorative justice initiatives in Rwanda and South Africa. She also leads her own workshops on creative writing, literature and drama in Uganda and Thailand, partly in an effort to avoid assuming a voyeuristic role all-too-often taken up by Western journalists documenting violence abroad. The classes that Dreisinger leads draw from the justice work that she conducts as the co-founder and director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP), a college re-entry program that enables formerly incarcerated people to pursue a higher education.
Though Dreisinger makes a persuasive case for reconsidering prison systems, there is much that she glosses over. For instance, after detailing the cruel treatment of prisoners and their inhumane living conditions, she remains "hopeful that progress in prison reform might continue." One reform that she seems to advocate for is the privatization of prisons.
During her time in Australia, a place where "the prison population has doubled in a decade," Dreisinger visits a couple of private prisons that mirror beachy rehabilitative centers and writer retreats. These prisons are run by two multinational British security companies, "justice services" giants Serco and G4S, which supply technologies like military weapons to detention centers, prisons and schools. Though Dreisinger offers this information, she posits that "perhaps there's such a thing as privatization with a conscience, implemented morally and progressively in the name of true corrections." The underlying point is that treating "people in prison more humanely costs less, and that private prisons are more accountable than government-run prisons." Dreisinger's argument is incongruous with the fact that private corporations are in the game to make a profit from prisons, and lobby heavily to keep incarceration numbers high in order to rake in profits.