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Published: June 13th 2009
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Family Visit
Family members talk to an inmate through prison bars. Although there is no one way to describe any prison, my experiences over the past two years have led me to believe that there are two very different types of incarceration in the United States. On one side of the spectrum are prisons like Stateville Correctional in Jessup, Illinois, which punishes inmates by placing them in Orwellian-style panopticon cellhouses with little-to-no focus on rehabilitation or their return to the free world. On the other side of the spectrum are prisons like the Youthful Offender System in Pueblo, Colorado, which houses potentially dangerous minors with the sole intention of rehabilitating them so that they never wind up in a real adult penitentiary. While there a number of differences between these two types of prisons, the most striking is the ultimate goal of incarceration: one is to punish and the other is to rehabilitate.
In the CERESO II prison in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, however, neither punishment nor rehabilitation seems to be the ultimate goal. Admittedly, one could argue that the prison officials punish inmates by squeezing 5-8 of them into one cell and rehabilitate them by providing them with classes in English and psychology; but, based on my experiences over the past
three days, there is a third goal of incarceration in Mexico that is perhaps more pervasive and important than the first two: the maintenance and perpetuation of family values.
During the first three days of our crew’s “incarceration” in Nuevo Laredo, we became acquainted with six or seven inmates from a wide variety of backgrounds. The first one who we got to know well was an English-speaker named Luis Bravo who was put in prison for five years for trying to steal a car. Like most of the inmates I had met in the United States, Luis had become very religious while behind bars and focused a lot of his energy on productive activities such as teaching English and cutting people’s hair. He lived with five other inmates, including another English-speaker named Marcos who had also served time in five American state prisons and one U.S. federal prison.
While talking with Luis, Marcos, and their four other cellmates, what surprised me the most was the amount of camaraderie and brotherhood that clearly existed between all of them. In the United States, prison inmates are often lucky if they are given a cellmate who they can tolerate and live
Marcos
Marcos talks to us about the differences between American and Mexican prisons. with peacefully. Of course, this is rarely the case. In many instances, American prisoners (especially newbies) are forced to give money or sexual favors to their cellmates and some are even killed if they refuse to comply with orders handed down through the prison hierarchy.
But in Mexico, each cell seemed to me to be its own family unit. Marcos and Luis continually referred to each other during interviews as ‘brothers’ and both referred to their other cellmate, Felipe, as their ‘father.’ They cooked together, ate together, and sometimes even worked together. In many ways, it appeared as though the prison had allowed, or even encouraged, these inmates to create their own families within the prison walls.
Of course, not all inmates in CERESO II get along as well as Marcos and Luis do. In the female unit, Modulo 5, we met a few inmates who admitted to getting in frequent fights with their cellmates. But many of these women were also able to maintain traditional families with their loved ones both inside and outside the prison walls. One woman who we met, Rosa, met her fiancé - a male inmate named Raul - while in prison and
Prison Catwalk
Jerry, Jose, and Officer Leo walk around the perimeter of the prison. the two will actually be getting married in just a couple of weeks. Other inmates, including many of the men who we met in Modulo 8, also get conjugal visits from their wives or girlfriends on the outside one night per week. Prison officials believe that these visits decrease conflict, violence, and rape behind bars.
In the United States, conjugal visits are an extreme rarity. As of 2009, only six states - California, Connecticut, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, and Washington - allow conjugal visits, even in minimum-security prisons. But my experiences over the past two years lead me to believe that this may be a huge mistake. By prohibiting inmates from maintaining sexual relationships with their loved ones on the outside, we are essentially removing one of the strongest incentives for prisoner rehabilitation. Instead of trying to better themselves, inmates in the U.S. now become absorbed in our country's violent "prison culture," which only serves to further increase their chances of re-offending after they are released. By bringing family back into the equation, though, maybe - just maybe - we can take one small step towards fixing our country’s very overpopulated and expensive prison system.
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Azeneth
non-member comment
Marcos
I was really moved by his story and wondered what came of Marcos. I'm interested on assisting him but do not know how . -f someone can inform me would be appreciated.