Prison is a monster
BY PASTOR ISAAC SCOTT
Pastor Isaac Scott is a multidisciplinary visual artist, journalist, and human rights activist. He is a Fellow at the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School, and founder and lead artist for The Confined Arts at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, where he spearheads the promotion of justice reform through the transformative power of the arts.
Pastor Isaac Scott is a multidisciplinary visual artist, journalist, and human rights activist. He is a Fellow at the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School, and founder and lead artist for The Confined Arts at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, where he spearheads the promotion of justice reform through the transformative power of the arts.
In conjunction with Coby Kennedy’s Summer 2021 exhibition Kalief Browder: The Box, Pioneer Works, For Freedoms, and Negative Space presented Beyond The Box, a four-part program series that considered the realities of mass incarceration through the lens of art and activism. Over the course of four weeks, Broadcast is releasing Beyond The Box’s accompanying video series, each paired with a newly commissioned text that further elaborates on the thematic pillars charted by For Freedoms: Awakening, Listening, Healing, and Justice. Below, for Listening, Pastor Isaac Scott speaks to the harms of incarceration and introduces works by several writers whom he’s worked with through his program The Confined Arts.
PRISON IS A MONSTER by PASTOR ISAAC SCOTT
Prison is a monster without taste buds, but with an inexhaustible appetite. The isolated, hyper-regulated nature of the prison environment is so radically different from the outside world that we must begin to imagine incarcerated life as existing in a society that is hidden within a larger society. Every year across this nation, thousands of people enter the prison system and everyone is chewed up, but not everyone is spit back out into society in a way that ensures a safe and successful reintegration. The deprived social environment of prison can impede one’s capacity to navigate various social obligations post-incarceration. Research shows that incarceration has negative psychological effects on people in prison. These include a dependence on institutional structure and contingencies; hypervigilance, interpersonal distrust, and suspicion; emotional over-control, alienation, and psychological distancing; social withdrawal and isolation; incorporation of exploitative norms of prison culture; diminished sense of self-worth and personal value; and post-traumatic stress reactions to the pains and memories of imprisonment.
The importance of public attitudes toward people impacted by the criminal legal system cannot be denied. Dehumanizing language and depictions, alongside misrepresentative storytelling, is often used to address and describe people who are impacted by the criminal legal system. The spectacularization of true crime television and criminal trials, together with false depictions of institutional life in and by the media, has provided a misleading and individualistic image of people touched by the criminal legal system, by depicting them as irrational, undisciplined individuals who willingly break the law and harm others for the sake of their own interest or pleasure. Such misrepresentations have fueled negative beliefs within public opinion and undeniably influences the general public’s pervasive negative perception of those incarcerated. The legitimacy of our current criminal justice system continues to depend on the willing participation of members of the public. Furthermore, the perpetual dehumanization of society’s lost sheep continues to fuel punitive attitudes, abusive penal policies, physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, general desensitization to such abuse, and reluctance to societal reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals.
We live in a nation where the line between accountability and punishment is not clear, and because there is no distinction, the two concepts become one in their application. The people of this country call for humane justice from the highest hills, but “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is the way this nation handles its own failures. Moving toward and creating a more harm-reductive criminal legal system means that we must define accountability outside of the context of punishment
