- #Percentage of americans that have done time in jail code#
- #Percentage of americans that have done time in jail tv#
Each time I had to spend a holiday break coughing, spreading my ass cheeks and putting on ill-fitting tans in front of correctional officers who called me “Big Bang Theory,” I was humiliated and dehumanized and traumatized anew.Īnd inside HCC, I found little hope for rehabilitation or effective reentry assistance. In retrospect, I would have preferred to have done my 90 days in one stretch. Nonetheless, I had relative privilege: My pretrial detention was stretched out over a year to allow me to work, an option I only had because I could afford a private attorney. I only needed to look down at the laminated ID clipped to my prison tans to know that my outside credentials no longer mattered. On the first of 90 nights I would spend incarcerated, I was transplanted - but not sustained. By design, prisons don’t allow the public to see what transpires inside. In time, reformers moved away from the brutality of the scaffold to the silence of imprisonment.
#Percentage of americans that have done time in jail code#
These settlers used public whipping, branding, dunking, pillory, mutilation and even execution to enforce a legal code that made little distinction between religious and criminal transgressions. But it reminded me of the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples by early Puritan settlers. The gym, which was still lit despite the late hour, looked like a makeshift shelter after nuclear fallout.įrom where I lay, I could see an unfinished mural with half of the Connecticut state seal and its Latin motto: Qui Transtulit Sustinet - “He who transplanted sustains.” Some see the state motto as positive evidence of rugged Yankee individualism. Exhausted, I spread my sheet and blanket atop the mattress and rolled an extra T-shirt into a lumpy pillow.
I couldn’t imagine that this was legal under the city’s fire code, but it was common practice. I received a flame-retardant mattress and a gray plastic “boat” - a stackable bunk without any parts that could be weaponized - and I anchored among a hundred other men. Others were splayed out, prone and eerily motionless. Some men were huddling together or gesturing in the air with inscrutable resolve. Others were on their mattresses shivering or having what looked like seizures. A few of the men were wrapped in blankets, like corpses. I was led down a brightly lit hallway into a gymnasium where I would join a mass of human beings in jagged rows. What I didn’t expect was to be admitted around midnight.
#Percentage of americans that have done time in jail tv#
I had watched the fictional TV show “Oz” and knew about the real-life abuse Kalief Browder endured on Rikers Island. HCC, according to the Department of Corrections website, is a “level 4, high-security urban jail” that “holds primarily pretrial offenders.” While I had heard that it is not the place where hardened criminals go to do real time, I was petrified. But it was not until I had to personally negotiate the criminal justice system that I fully realized what many Americans of color have to deal with on a regular basis. Before I went to jail, I was peripherally aware that our criminal justice system tilts the axis of power toward those who create the laws and exert political influence. Though I was born in Washington, D.C., and I have largely benefited from the very systems of discrimination that I would later suffer, I haven’t always felt like an American.Īs it turns out, nothing made me feel more American than being incarcerated. I probably make that association because I am a Tamilian Brahmin American whose parents immigrated from South India in the 1960s. I think of a goddess who needs to be propitiated with human sacrifice. Whenever I hear that phrase “satisfy the state,” I visualize the fanged Hindu goddess Kali, with her long lolling tongue, flailing multiple arms and necklace of decapitated human heads.
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