Colorado’s crime rate per 100,000 people is at 635, pretty much in the middle of state rankings. Compared to the United States’ incarceration rate of 698, this looks good; compared to Canada’s rate of 114 or the Netherlands’ of 59, not so much. Non-violent crimes that do not greatly affect other people’s lives should not result in incarceration. Rehabilitation programs should be established to preserve human dignity.
Aimé Césaire, a Martinican author, highlights, “[A person] who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”
Humans must be treated as human beings; if not, chaos ensues. People who commit crime cannot be looked down upon, seen as less human and subjected to months or years of imprisonment where animosity is forced upon them.
In Colorado, Hispanic people are 2.31 times more likely to be incarcerated than White people, and Black people are 6.44 times more likely to be incarcerated than Caucasians. That this is still up for discussion is bizzarre; how long must discrimination be fought against and equity for? Statistics reflect the de facto discrimination occurring in everyday life, and yet almost nothing is being done against it. It is ironic that the U.S. calls itself the “Land of the Free” when blatant racism causes Americans of color to be more likely to be put behind bars.
In Colorado, an inmate makes $0.84 to $2.45 per day for a full time assignment. The Federal Prison Industry earned $500 million in sales in fiscal 2016. At the state level, the business can be even more extreme—a market of 61,000 captive laborers is worth well over a billion dollars. It is a human rights violation and a pure disgrace to the modern world when slavery is allowed within any society. People are profiting off of slave labor—hard, menial, monotonous or unpaid work. While work is essential for an inmate because it is an active interaction and contribution to society, they need to be compensated justly. When the Constitution allows slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment through a single clause, “except as a punishment for crime,” the reliability of the law, a body providing justice and safety to the people, is questioned. The dissenting view that prisoners should work because their housing and food is being provided by the government for free is hypocritical because the majority of prisoners are not willingly jailed. Slavery, in all forms, needs to be abolished, and it is absurd that this is still debated. In Colorado, the change to the 13th was on the ballot in 2016, but it failed because of a multitude of possible reasons ranging from ignorance to racism.
What happens to incarcerated people after they are released? The unemployment rate of formerly incarcerated people is over 27 percent—the U.S.’s is 3.9 percent. Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public. 12.83 percent of new commitments in Colorado prisons are returning paroles with a new crime. Also apparent is the discrimination against people who appear poor; people think themselves better than others in more unfortunate circumstances and once again don’t wish to interact and “dirty” themselves with the sick or impoverished. The stigma against incarcerated people is severely damaging their chances to become employed, stabilized and to live life.
Colorado prisons have massive problems that prey on human rights and dignity. There is no easy way to fix this, but a good place to start is to decriminalize personal choices to take drugs, fight against discrimination of people of color and people living in poverty, pay prisoners justly for their work and break down barriers preventing formerly incarcerated people from re-entering society.
