Time and time again, the criminal justice system responds to transgression and everyday life with violence and adds harm to the equation. These kinds of scenes in intensive care units and emergency rooms are so prevalent that there are now doctors and nurses in the United States and in Canada that explicitly identify as penal abolitionists or carceral abolitionists (Paynter et al., 2022; DiZoglio and Telma, 2022). They have formed organizations to reveal that one of the main sources of harm to the bodies of the people they see in hospitals are police offi cers and prison guards. What kind of a society would continue to fund such an egregious form of harm that our most intelligent and most caring people (doctors and nurses) have explicitlyfl agged as destructive? What kind of a society would continue to promote that harm? Given such examples, what kinds of myths are necessary to sustain the idea that police and prisons promote order or safety and security in our world?
These scenes, which are just a few vignettes that could be drawn from any ICU in a major city from across Canada or the United States, point to a society whose priorities have been hijacked by powerful political interests such as police and guard unions (Ben-Moshe, 2020; Wang, 2018; Weaver and Lerman, 2010). There are so many forms of abuse, neglect, and harm that the criminal justice system causes in our world (Laniyonu, 2022; Skinns and Wooff , 2021; Harkin, 2015; Hancock and Jewkes, 2011). Carceral spaces are designed to deprive, maim, and dehumanize (Moran et al., 2018; Moran, 2012). There are many stories of people surviving detention, people surviving imprisonment, and people surviving criminal justice system surveillance too. The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) exists to give voice to those survivors of system contact with criminal justice agencies, of the pains of policing and imprisonment, of the injustices of the so-called justice system, as well as the crimmigration control system and other parallel systems of control.
THIS ISSUE
In this issue of the JPP, we continue in this tradition of examining the multitude of harms caused by the criminal justice system in general, and prisons and jails in particular.“Illusion of Parole” by Gordon Pack explores some of the problems with existing parole systems. Through an analysis of his experience of the Maryland Parole Commission, the author examines its history of biased and prejudiced choices, anomalies, and contradictions. He contends that the pains of incarceration continue throughout the parole commission process and when living on parole.In “Belgian Prison Policy: Half a Century of Broken Promises” by Luk Vervaet, the author examines some of the contradictions of the criminal justice system and the harms that these contradictions cause in Belgium through an analysis of prison policy at a site of confi nement called the Begijnenstraat. The Begijnenstraat was known decades ago to be an overcrowded, harmful facility that did not live up to the promises of the so-called rehabilitation of the penal state. The author shows that decades after recommendations were made, from 2018 to 2021 a series of journalistic inquiries showed that the health conditions inside the prison continued to be harmful. They also noted that there were pests, mice, and mold in the facility. The author suggests there is no reason to continue to put people in harm’s way inside this facility.