The Equal Justice Initiative talks about the Criminal Justice System in a negative context. They always back up their claims with facts and what they are doing about these claims. For example, a lot of children get incarcerated and put into the adult prisons. Children as young as 8 years old have been put into the adult prisons which is not good because children are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted in these prisons than in juvenile centers and the suicide rate for children increases when they are put in such harsh conditions. These adult prisons are very harsh and my dad has told me countless stories of some of the conditions he had to live in. Before I go on, I want to tell you why my dad was in prison in Hamilton, AL, and what he went through. About 4 years ago, my dad was falsely accused of stealing a lot of money. He went through unfair trials and our lawyers did not defend him well. They were good friends with the prosecutor and didn’t want to call him out for lying so they didn’t do anything so my dad went to the Madison County Jail. While he was there, he was treated poorly and he and the other inmates did not eat on the weekends. They would have two meals the whole weekend. The food service administration regulation in Alabama says, “Inmates shall be provided three meals per day, of which, at least two are hot meals...there can be no more than fourteen hours between evening meals and breakfast.” Madison County Jail did not follow this regulation but somehow they got away with it. Commissioners have a budget of what they need to spend on food but some people find a way to provide the absolute necessary amount but nothing more and can keep the money. In this case, the Sheriff who was running Madison County Jail, spent a little bit of money on food for the prisoners and kept the remainder for himself. To me, that is not ok. My dad said that a lot of prison violence comes from not getting enough food and the solution is so simple. Feed them more food and they won’t hurt anyone. Also, a lot of prison violence comes out of harsh conditions. While my dad was in the prison in Hamilton, AL, the warden would never turn on any A/C so in the summer it was super hot and in the winter, you had to bundle up with every clothing item you owned. One year, the warden turned off the hot water and made the inmates bath outside with a hose. Lots of the inmates were upset about this and took their anger out on the other inmates. If the warden had been somewhat nicer and turned on hot water or A/C, they wouldn’t have had a violence problem. Alabama has one of the highest violence rates in prisons in the country and I can see why. I would be frustrated too if I couldn’t have heat or air conditioning or hot water in the winter. These are just simple solutions to the big issue of violence but once again, the more money the warden saves, the more they can keep for themselves. The EJI has helped people see the harsh truth of the criminal justice system and talks a lot about racial injustice. African Americans make up around 13% of the U.S.’s population but make up 28% of all arrests. A lot of these are from false accusations. African Americans are two and a half times more likely to be arrested than whites and are less likely to be sentenced to probation and more likely sentenced to prison. What this means is that, based on your crime, you can go on probation but not have to go to prison. You will have limitations, for example, you can’t leave the state you live in and you have to meet with a probation officer about once a month. African Americans are less likely to be put on this than whites and that’s not fair. The EJI did an experiment asking if Americans’ would support harsh criminal justice policies and the EJI told them how many people of each race were in prison. The EJI said this,”The more black people they believed were incarcerated, the more they supported aggressive policing tactics and excessively punitive sentencing laws.” That is hard to take in but it correlates back to history. During the Civil Rights Movement, white people hated African Americans and treated them unfairly and that still goes on today as shown in this experiment. I support the EJI’s claims for racial injustice and injustice in general because I have read stories about our criminal justice system and have heard stories through my dad. One of the stories he told me was about a guy he was working out with in the “yard”. The yard was the outside area that the inmates could go to to workout. This guy was benching 405 pounds and had a “suicide grip” which means he didn’t have a firm grasp on the bar. He drove the bar up and it slipped out of his hands and crushed his chest. He laid on the ground motionless and none of the guards came to help him. He laid there for hours as still and stiff as a board slowly breathing and wincing in pain until finally he was helped to the infirmary. After hearing all of these stories from my dad, I have seen the other side of the criminal justice system and how corrupt it is. The guards were very harsh to my dad and the other inmates and made them get up everyday at 3 AM and had breakfast at 3:30 until 4 AM. If you didn’t go eat in that window, you wouldn’t eat until 11 AM. They would also wake my dad up at midnight to go spot them while they worked out so on those nights, he didn’t get any sleep. Because of these such harsh conditions, a lot of the inmates come out of prison dealing with PTSD. Researchers only applied PTSD with the military until now. Some of the symptoms of PTSD from prison are: sleep deprivation/continued nightmares, constant flashbacks, extreme tension and anxiety, irritability, non-responsiveness or lack of involvement with external world, prolonged feelings of detachment or estrangement of other, and memory trouble. When my dad first got out, he struggled with PTSD for a while. He had a natural alarm clock that forced him to get up at 3 AM and he was always on the watch for someone. In prison, you always have to be on guard because someone might get upset from the conditions and lash out. You have to have this fight or flight mentality 24/7. He would also get nervous when we would go out someplace so for a while, he stayed home until he got more comfortable with the “external world”. Now, he has gotten better but for a while we knew Dad was home but he wasn’t really there. He still gets up early as usual but it’s now 4:30 AM and I get up with him because we go workout or swim in the morning which he loves to do. It is something he did in prison and that’s how he survived. He went into Hamilton as a scrawny guy but had the fire like the biggest guy in there had. He would workout with the biggest guys in the prison until he basically ran the “yard”. If anybody wanted to go workout, they had to go talk to him and see if they could. He liked to workout but now he can’t go a single day without working out. When Dad was in prison, he called us two to three times a week for 15 minutes because that was as long as the guards would let him talk to us. I remember our phone calls and how everytime I would talk to him, I had to tune out the screaming and the yelling from the other inmates coming from his end of the phone call. He started to fill out an application form for visiting basically the minute he got to Hamilton. The application process is very long and the inmate has to fill out 6 forms before they can be approved or rejected. I remember that his application got approved about a year after he got to Hamilton and we could go see him. We drove down there and had to go through metal detectors but we didn’t have to get strip searched like the people in front of us had to. We stood at the counter while my mom talked to one of the guards and I read the rules on the side of the wall. My dad came out in normal clothes, which was good, and I immediately rushed to hug him but the guards all looked at me with scowled faces and I hugged him and one of the guards yelled out, “That’s long enough!” I had barely embraced him and I hadn’t seen him in so long. I was immediately fueled with anger towards these guards. We talked for a couple hours in the visitation area and reminisced on old times and some of the new things that we were all doing in our lives and it was great. It was great until we had to leave and I was very upset. All of the guards kept looking at me when Dad was taken back into the complex and I just scowled at them or didn’t look at them in the eyes when they would talk to me. I had heard all of these stories about these guys and how they treated these inmates that I had no respect for them. I support the EJI’s claims on the criminal justice system and I think what they are doing is great to try and help the criminal justice system become better and less corrupt. A lot of these problems that we have with our prisons come from the harsh conditions that the criminal justice system creates. If the criminal justice system would treat everyone like human beings and treat them fairly, then the violence would go down and the prisons wouldn’t have such a harmful effect on the inmates whether they are in or out.
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