How Many Bars Do You Have?

The prison mentality of America's youth

By Barry Sanders

Draw a picture of a prison for me.  I asked little kids to do this.  I asked really young kids, some of them in first or second grade.  I asked about thirty or forty that same question.  And each time I got the same response. The drawings all had the same details: bars, stripes, guns, concrete walls, and the tiniest of cells.  A few kids added dogs and one or two put in cloudy skies, or else told me that when you’re in prison the sky always looks stormy.  They gave their renderings very little grass, and the buildings they shaded a greasy gray.

I don’t know what prompted me to ask such a question; but I’m glad I did.  Oh yeah, I really do know and I’ll tell you in a moment.  Still, their responses surprised me- not because of their similarity, but the fact that each and every one of them- boys and girls alike- actually had in their imaginations a picture of what a prison would look like.

Where did they get these forbidding images? I assumed, of course, that some of them might have picked up their ideas from watching television, or movies, or from playing one video game or another.  Sure, that was possible, and perhaps even probable.  But certainly not all of them- not all of those little boys and girls could have gotten their ideas from one screen or another.  The idea of prison must exist as a reality in the playgrounds and in the classrooms and in the house.  Maybe the tiniest children even whisper about jail.  At any rate, a cell, sometimes no bigger than six feet by nine, has taken up a vivid and enduring life inside the minds of the kids of this nation.

Is it true of kids in other countries?  Who knows?  From my feeble, impressionistic test, I say it’s definitely true of this country.  And it scares me.  The smallest child knows that if he or she goes too far off the straight and narrow, there is only one place to eventually wind up.  (An aside: I asked them to draw for me a picture of freedom, they all, again, drew the same thing- a picture of a bird in flight.)

I said earlier that I knew why I asked the question.  I am interested in the culture of punishment we seem to embrace in this country.  By some counts, our prison and jail population nears three million people.  Add to that the people on parole, awaiting trial, on probation, in camps of one kind or another, and the number reaches somewhere over five million people.  Of course, for every person behind bars, at least five or six others suffer- mothers, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, sisters, aunts and uncles, and on and on and on.  America has a higher incarceration rate for adult black males than South Africa during the worst years of Apartheid.  Prisons have been among the top three growth industries in this country for the past decade or more.  (Hotels and gambling casinos make up the other part of the trio.) And still our prisons are overstuffed with people.  And still the majority of those behind bars have been charged with non-violent drug offenses.  And still the majority of them are people of color.  And we could not beat back the three-strikes law.

We love prisons.  It’s the first thing the military built in Iraq.  The first Congressional Medal of Honor for the Decimation of Iraq was awarded to a marine who was attacked and killed while building a temporary prison in Baghdad.  What happens to our prisons? Can we take Abu Ghraib as an example?  I would need to hear a very good reason why we should not.  This is a country that even has a film genre made up of prison breaks.  Everyone has a favorite.  Mine is Papillion.

No one now needs fancy talk about Foucault and the Panopticon.  George Orwell be damned.  No doubt about it, THEY are watching.  When the New York Times can say on its editorial page that the Patriot Act (George O to George W: cool it, they all speak newspeak now) “gives too much power to invade the privacy of ordinary Americans and otherwise trample on their rights,” each one of us should take notice.  Parts of the Act are currently up for congressional review.  We all ought to read it to see what we handed over in the name of security and terrorism.  If you do, you might think twice about checking out that book in the library, since section 215 of the Act allows the government to demand your library records and makes it a crime for any library staff member to inform you.  You might decide to double-lock your doors, since under section 213 the government can now search your home without your knowledge and wait some considerable time before informing you (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits searches without ever revealing that a search has taken place).  The Patriot Act allows your government to demand your medical records, intercept your email messages, and tap your telephone.  We’re all behind bars; we’re all watching the warden.

No need to worry about the Patriot Act; I know what real jail looks like.  It’s right there, locked inside my head.  Maybe that’s how the reasoning goes in this country.  But if I were to draw a picture of prison, I think I know what I would produce.  I might just hand over a crude rendering of the White House.