OP-ED

Greg Belzley | An inmate dies

Greg Belzley
Special to The Courier-Journal;

The great Russian author Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, once said that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

Back in January, James Embry, an inmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary, starved himself to death while KSP's security and medical staff watched and did nothing. It's unthinkable, but it was old news to me. Some years ago, I represented the estate of an inmate at KSP who was allowed to die of gangrenous intestines after the physician there decided he was faking his illness. Prisons like KSP say very little good about the degree of civilization in American society.

The Kentucky Department of Corrections has thoroughly investigated the incident and has issued a damning report that will likely lead to some changes in some policies, procedures and personnel in an effort to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

But there's another, more fundamental and more important change needed. We need to change our hearts.

Starting in the 1970s, we began packing our prisons to the brim as a consequence of our decision to get "tough on crime." We criminalized everything, and increased prison sentences and restricted the right of a judge or anyone else to reduce them. In the 30 years that followed, Kentucky's population increased less than 30 percent, but the number of people in its prisons shot up an astounding 650 percent.

This enormous increase in the number of inmates demanded a commensurate increase in taxes to pay for their incarceration and rehabilitation — assuming that just 2 percent of the world's population could ever afford to incarcerate 25 percent of the world's prisoners, as we do now. But we don't want to pay our teachers, policemen and firemen a decent salary, or pay what it costs to take care of our veterans after they return home from wars overseas, much less pay to take care of people serving sentences for committing crimes. So, our prisons are crumbling, overcrowded and understaffed, the people that go to work there are poorly trained, poorly supervised and underpaid, and rehabilitation comes a distant second to just plain punishment.

We rationalized our penury by telling ourselves that convicts in general were bad people who didn't need or deserve our help. Over time, we dropped the "people" part and now see Americans behind bars as just plain "bad."

The media has only reinforced our disdain for people serving time. TV shows and movies that challenge our assumptions — particularly when it means we may need to imprison fewer people or pay more taxes — aren't all that popular. So we don't hear about the majority of inmates serving often inordinately long sentences for nonviolent crimes, struggling to educate themselves or learn a trade during their incarceration so they can become productive, taxpaying citizens when they're released. Instead, we get served our daily diet of the super-maxes and the lockdowns and the relatively few inmates who are verbally abusive, hyper-violent and utterly incorrigible (often due to mental illness), and we think that's what's in our prisons and we needn't care.

But we have to care; otherwise, the people who are responsible for meeting the basic human needs of inmates — like medical care for conditions that are obviously serious — won't care, either. Prisoners' access to necessary medical care is a right that flows from our Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a right that is every bit as sacrosanct as freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. But we've de-emphasized civics education in our schools and untethered ourselves from the very principles that fueled the creation of our country in the first place and for which our soldiers continue to fight and die. People just aren't all that familiar anymore with the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

It wasn't all that long ago that rehabilitation — the novel idea of releasing people from prison who were healthier, better educated and more employable than when they went in — was considered the primary purpose of incarceration. That was back when we took away an offender's freedom to punish them for their conduct, but recognized that physical and mental illness, ignorance, and poverty often played a part, too. That was back when we named our state's biggest prison the Kentucky State Reformatory. That was back when Tom Jones' "Green, Green Grass of Home" was one of his biggest hits and a certified tearjerker. That was back when we remembered that these people behind bars were fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters — that they were once our neighbors and co-workers and might well be again.

There was no "green grass of home" for Mr. Embry. No one claimed his body, so he was buried in the cemetery of the prison where no one cared enough to keep him from starving himself to death in despair. He was no less a child of God than the rest of us. I hope there's money enough to mow the grass.

Greg Belzley, a partner at BelzleyBathurst Attorneys, is an inmates' rights lawyer. You can see Tom Jones sing "Green, Green Grass of Home" at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSajFnkUxQY.