Power Over Truth in Prison Leads to Injustice

 Michigan's prisons use three classes of misconduct tickets. Class three tickets are considered "minor" tickets and usually come with minor and short-term consequences. This might include loss of privileges (LOP), like use of the phone, Jpay emails, and recreation time for a few days. 

Class two tickets are a little more severe, and they lead to longer-term LOP, perhaps ten or fifteen days. They also earn prisoners "points" on their misconduct history, which may eventually lead to an elevation of security level. 

Class one tickets are considered "major" tickets, and they often lead to administrative segregation (the hole), a greater increase in points, and longer-term consequences, like 30 or more days LOP or top lock. Top lock includes everything LOP does, plus it confines prisoners to their cells or bunks (or the hole) for a period of days. 

This morning, another prisoner told me that he received a class 2 ticket for an incident in the medical area. He is insulin dependent and must go to insulin lines in medical 3 times a day. A few days before, he had an issue with the corrections officer covering medical, and the officer wrote him a ticket as a result. Class 3 tickets are "heard" by a unit officer who assigns the sanction. Class 2 tickets are "heard" by a sergeant, or sometimes a lieutenant. 

Today, the prisoner had a hearing with a lieutenant, where the prisoner pled his case. Apparently, the lieutenant agreed with everything the prisoner had said in his defense, and then told him, "But, I have to side with my officer and find you guilty anyway." Understandably, the guy was very unhappy. 

I know from experience that many times other prisoners do not know how to handle themselves or communicate properly with authority figures, so I am keeping that in mind. But, I also have seen too many times to count when prison staff treat prisoners unjustly and side with their officers, even when knowing the officer is wrong. It's a "code" they often abide by. Truth, evidence, and right don't matter in these situations. Only power matters. 

And power trumps justice every time. 

I know that it's ironic for a Michigan prisoner to be speaking about justice. After all, I'm in prison because of my own unjust actions. But as my mom used to say all the time when I was growing up, "Two wrongs don't make a right." 

A system that is designed to punish injustice ought to at least try to model justice. At times it does, but more often it models that "might makes right," a fallacy that got many of us in trouble in the first place. That's not how you teach wrongdoers to reform their faulty thinking. 

This prisoner was given only 2 days LOP for his supposed infraction, which itself illustrates that the lieutenant didn't think the prisoner was actually guilty. It's too bad that our justice system and prison system have adopted the philosophy of convict first and ask questions later (maybe). I know our Founding Fathers would be appalled at such injustice.