Defined By Prejudice: The Price Of Freedom
For most, freedom is the ability to make your own decisions and control your own life. It means you can choose where you live, where you work, who you see, and who you are as a person. For some, the meaning of freedom changes once you have experienced the harsh reality of incarceration. It often means you are now told where you can live, whether you are employable, who you are allowed to see, and who you are now as a person is drenched in stigma and defined by prejudice.
This stigma acts covertly and subliminally. It is not forthright and outspoken, yet it actively demarcates where people who have experienced the prison system are placed in society: economically, socially, and politically. People can no longer wholly govern themselves, but are governed by the lines constructed and consolidated by this prejudice and stigma, and this ultimately shows that prison sentences have a far-reaching collateral damage, not constrained by the time or the place of the sentence.-
Economically, landlords are hesitant to rent to ex-offenders, meaning a place to rest your head becomes a luxury, not a necessity. Employers view ex-offenders with caution, meaning that jobs and employment become hopelessly unachievable, further perpetuating economic difficulties. Subsequently leaving those who have been incarcerated without economic and social mobility, meaning that the chance of re-offending and returning to prison increases. Socially, incarceration impacts social connections and familial units, leaving those coming to an end or ending their sentence without a strong support network which further consolidates the aforementioned difficulties above. Politically speaking, there comes a question of whether incarceration becomes politically motivated where a greater emphasis — through policies and funding — is placed on imprisonment, rather than on vital rehabilitation initiatives that reduce re-offending, and fundamentally improves the lives of the men and women placed in these initiatives.
What this means is that this economically, socially, and politically motivated stigma and prejudice becomes a part of the re-offending process. Whilst prison is sometimes a necessary punishment, there is little in the way of sustaining rehabilitation, meaning that these men and women remain marginalised, vulnerable, and a slave to their circumstances.
Britain’s prison population is the highest in Western Europe and has steadily grown by 69% in the last 30 years. In Scotland, 34% of prisoners reported having a disability, 26% reported that during their upbringing they had been in care, 38% were under the influence of drugs and the time of their arrest, 95% of prisoners are male, 72% are under the age of 36, 70% of prisoners suffer from mental health problems, and approximately 69% had committed a non-violent crime. These statistics delineate that there is a striking connection between drug and mental health issues, gender, and childhood trauma. A UK study found that “experiencing four or more ‘adverse childhood experiences’ was linked with increased likelihood of spending a night in police or prison custody” and that “inequality affects areas with high imprisonment rates and changing patterns of inequality in Scottish society filter through the justice system.” In this context, it is conceivable that mass incarceration for non-violent crimes does little in the way of reducing re-offending and improving the landscape of various economically deprived communities. There is a clear failure to address the fundamental components of what drives a person to offend, whether this be early childhood trauma, drug abuse, mental health issues, or a lack of economic mobility.
Subsequently, this brings forth the argument of rehabilitation versus imprisonment. Whilst imprisonment provides retribution, and satiates the public’s overarching desire for justice and punishment. Prison exposes the offender to an environment in which unhealthy behaviors compound themselves and furthers the negative cycle in which the offender was previously a part of. In comparison, rehabilitation for non-violent crimes provides the opportunity to address issues in relation to adverse mental health, drug addiction, and childhood trauma. By providing the offender with developed recovery initiatives such as counselling and addiction support, these issues are addressed and the chances of re-offending are reduced. The long-term collateral damage that imprisonment causes is subverted by challenging where ex-offenders are demarcated within society. Rehabilitation provides the means and opportunities for ex-offenders to gain upward mobility by empowering them through various initiatives that aim to increase employment, economic stability, education, social connections, and mental health/drug recovery. Ultimately, recovery initiatives improves the lives of the people involved in them, improves the communities suffering from economic deprivation, reduces re-offending, reduces mass incarceration for non-violent crimes, and successfully challenges the stigma and prejudice attached to the men and women who have faced the harsh reality of incarceration.
Freedom should not be subjective, freedom should be all-encompassing. Yet, freedom for those who have experienced incarceration comes with long-reaching conditions and consequences that fail to end when the sentence does. This process provokes and consolidates a negative stigma and prejudice attached to imprisonment, which ultimately perpetuates the cycle of offending and sustains the various factors and issues that originally contributed to the incarceration. Talking about the stigma is not enough, active participation and involvement is needed in order to successfully challenge it. The implementation of various recovery initiatives and rehabilitation programmes does just this, where men and women are empowered and are able to assert their own upward economic and social mobility. This existing stigma provokes the question of whether one is truly free once you leave prison. People are often defined by their past and their imprisonment — which becomes the ultimate price of freedom for them — yet, through empowerment, conversations, action, rehabilitation, and recovery initiatives, people who have experienced incarceration are able to shed the metaphorical shackles of prejudice and actively challenge the stigma that so strongly seeks to define and demarcate them.
