“Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration” Takeaways

The American prison system is broken and it’s also breaking down the prisoners.

Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration is an impactful and inspiring book by Christine Montross, M.D. This book dives into how our current systems fail to effectively rehabilitate prisoners and actually harm them in the process. Montross details how incarcerated prisoners’ mental health, racial disparities within the judicial system, and the Americans’ need for revenge.

These are our takeaways from Waiting for an Echo. 

Top 10 Highlights

1. Our correctional practices prioritize vengeance and suffering over justice and rehabilitation.
2. Correctional facilities in our country operate under the absolute, if erroneous, belief that all who are incarcerated have done wrong, and those who have done wrong, deserve punishment.
3. In a conversation, a guard said to the author, “I used to work at an adult facility, maximum facility. When the inmates would ask for special favors like books, we would say, ‘Where do you think you are, yo? This is jail, not Yale.’”
4. Psychosocial deprivation in childhood has been demonstrated to physically alter the brain structure at cellular and molecular levels. The results of these fundamental structural changes in the brain manifests themselves in functional, behavioral, and psychological impairments. In other words, experience builds brain circuitry, and the way these circuits are wired is reflected in the ways children learn, develop, and behave. 
5. In the name of safety and punishment, prison constraints prevent incarcerated men and women from becoming more educated, more skilled, and more whole. In addition, the constraints render people less apt to reintegrate into our communities in productive, law- abiding ways. Detainees who participate in educational classes while incarcerated have a 13% higher chance of getting a job once they leave prison. More strikingly, they are half as less likely to break the law again. Yet, two-thirds of American prisons have no means for detainees to take educational classes beyond the high school level.
6. Extreme sentencing brings out the worst in our society. Our punitive policies undergirded by injustice and illogic have resulted in an overcrowded federal prison system in which nearly half of the people being held are serving time not for violent crimes, but for drug offenses. 
7. Children who end up in prison do so disproportionately based on their race. Black kids are 2.3x more likely to be arrested than their white peers, a discrepancy that’s higher than it was even ten years ago. At each stage of the judicial process, racial disparities among children multiply. Black juveniles are less likely to have their cases diverted before hearings than their white peers. They’re less likely to receive probation as a sentence. They are more than 4x as likely as white juveniles to be committed to a detention facility. 84% of juvenile offenders who received a life sentence without parole in the state of Florida for non-homicide cases were African-American, though the population of the state as a whole is less than 16% black. 
8. There are countries in the world where it’s considered inhumane and counterproductive to isolate a man for more than three days, and yet our justice systems will isolate children for up to a year. We’ve built entire prisons with the sole purpose of holding men in seclusion for months, years, even decades.
9. I’ve come to believe that we want both things, safer just communities and also revenge. But those desires are mutually exclusive, so despite countless studies demonstrating our current prison practices are inefficient, expensive, ineffective, and inhumane, we’re not jolted into action because we’re unwilling to relinquish our desire for vengeance. We have abandoned the goal of rehabilitation and incarceration, we only aim to punish. Our methods of punishment harm serving and satisfying our reflexive fury in the short term, but once these harmed men and women return to our cities, to our port authorities, into our neighborhoods, our methods of punishment prove in the long run to harm us all.
10. We must avail ourselves of a choice and we must first be honest. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

We can’t talk future of work without talking about the impact of the criminal justice system on our workers.

Interested in learning more? Get your hands on a copy of Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration today! 

Now, back to work.