Here is the first of a three-part thought-provoking piece on prison and prisoners. We’ll publish part two tomorrow.

At 11 PM EST, Wednesday, September 21, Georgia prison inmate Troy Davis was pronounced dead from lethal injection. To his last breath, he maintained his innocence of the murder for which he was condemned. Very likely, the doubt which shrouded his case will never be cleared; at least, not in the dimension which we presently inhabit. Whether a murderer or an innocent man was executed will always be subject to debate. There is nothing left of Troy Davis, now, but a jar of ashes – and the matter of our own guilt or innocence in allowing a man who may have been innocent to be euthanized in the prime of his life.

I have long contemplated the institution of prison and its function as cultural shadow. In my capacity as creative writing instructor at a California men's prison, for five years I had a unique opportunity to observe the corrections system at work and to acquaint myself with some of its charges, a handful of inmates among the almost two million now incarcerated in the United States. This experience and those acquaintances have changed my life and caused me to look deeply into the fabric of American culture and the role of the writer, there.

I want to make two important points, right at the outset:

First, I believe the majority of prison inmates are among the most severely psychologically wounded members of our culture. The psychologist Winnicott speaks of a child's "knowledge from experience of having been mad." Madness is not a state of mind one readily equates with infancy and childhood and it is a disturbing notion. Yet severe early trauma was part of the life history of the majority of inmates in my classes. It's not without reason that one of my favorite students, a black man whose mother was a prostitute, who never knew a father, and who was born addicted to crack cocaine and was prostituted for over a decade as a child, has said, "The Department of Corrections says my name is John Doe Smith, but I'm here to tell you, my real name is Madniz!" A survey conducted by the U.S. Justice Department revealed that among those polled, 87% of female and 44% of male prisoners were attacked either physically or sexually or both, as children. It is not difficult to imagine that, for them, normal ego growth was interrupted by early, incapacitating, traumatic anxiety.

My second point has to do with the privatization of prisons in America. With this trend, a new and insidious threat has arisen that strikes at the heart of the democratic process, of Constitutional guarantees, and of the moral and ethical underpinnings of our nation. The agenda of private prison corporations is not so much hidden as thinly veiled behind euphemisms hinting at the inmate population as a resource – as a cheap and plentiful domestic labor force. Masquerading as a virtuous anti-crime movement is the reinstitution of what virtually amounts to slavery.

This might sound preposterous, but consider the facts: prison industries show a multi-billion dollar profit, annually. Inmates at our prison are paid between 12 and 65 cents an hour. They have no benefits, no union, and no right to refuse to work. Their work spaces are not subject to OSHA inspection. Their work hours are not necessarily limited to eight per day nor are they compensated for overtime or hazardous duty. There is a formal assumption of superiority by the officers who oversee them, providing great latitude for arbitrary and capricious behavior on their part and concomitant fear on the part of the inmates.

Consider further that three-strikes laws, nationwide, have filled prisons to overflowing with non-violent offenders, many of whom will be incarcerated for life, the vast majority of whom are people of color. Behind political hyperbole about "making our streets safe" lurks the specter of greed, and a deliberate economic policy geared to compete with third world countries in the labor market, with the added element of gratifying racist agendas.

To recapitulate, for emphasis: inmates are among the most severely psychologically wounded members of our society and, with the rise of private prisons, they are being targeted as a virtual slave labor force for industry. Despite its name, the Department of Corrections is much more involved in warehousing than in correcting or redeeming human lives. Therefore, one finds a situation in which those who are among the most severely traumatized individuals of our society are shut away in subhuman conditions, which both recapitulate and exacerbate the original trauma, without benefit of psychotherapeutic treatment and the barest of creative outlets, with the likelihood of becoming lifelong drudges in prison industries. That a nation which thinks of itself as among the most civilized in the world could treat its wounded so abysmally is a shocking thing and speaks to our collective, medieval notions about criminality.

Suzan Still is the author of the Fiction Studio Books novel Commune of Women.

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