Have you ever been in the joint?

No, not as in inmate.

I worked a a very large facility, in the prison infirmary for a few years, I also worked for a company that did medical contracting with private and public prisons across the Midwest, so I’ve been in many private and  public prison facilities, and in one federal facility to provide medical services for inmates, I also worked on one epidemiological study conducted in a prison to track TB infections and transmissions in the Bronx mainly.

I eventually got out of that shit, because that whole “doing good or changing a system from the inside,” is total BS and I couldn’t take being part of that System at all. 

The COs were brutal and openly racist to the medial staff, HIV counselor, addiction specialist, the teaching staff and all other “civilians” that provided services to the “convicts,” so just imagine how it was for the inmates in those facilities.  The Black COs were just as sadistic as the White COs and they would overlook the Racism of their White co-workers. They really resented anyone in the System that actually tried to help the prisoners, real rehabilitation hurt the job security of the prison guards and administration.  SMH. 

There were rewarding parts to it though.  I lived in the Hood where many of the inmates were taken from and returned to, so I’d be at the ball court, or store and a Brother could come to me and say “I remember you from GMDC, you was real cool, you knew how to treat people.”  That shit would happen all the time.  I never really remembered them, because I could see over 100 or more inmates a day; but they remembered me and they remembered that I treated them with human dignity and respect, and that shit meant a lot to some of them because the System tried to dehumanized them at every turn.  That shit was therapeutic for me, cuz I was traumatized in my own way working in that system. 

The worst abuses I saw first hand were carried out in the juvenile centers and the women’s prisons; especially when it came to sexual abuses.  But Atrocities would go on every single day, even in the jails, where people were detained but not yet convicted of any crime. 

I don’t claim to know what it is to actually be an inmate in the Prison Industrialist Complex, I can only speak on what I’ve been told, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve learned in researching history, prison policy, and the larger impacts of mass incarceration. 

I’ve concluded that Mass Incarceration is one of the most basic methods of Genocide; all campaigns of Genocide begin with isolation, criminalization/demonetization, and the mass concentration/incarceration of the targeted population.  I saw that shit from within and without.