I spent five years living in Lincoln, Nebraska while earning my Ph.D. During the last four, I volunteered at Nebraska State Penitentiary.
It all began in 1996 when one of my professors, Susan Miller, invited me to come speak to the members of a Native inmates group called NASCA: Native American Spiritual and Cultural Awareness. I came in, met they guys, gave a talk, and answered their questions.
Not long after, I received an invitation to become a regular visitor to NASCA. I accepted, and thus began my stint of biking a few miles to the state prison most Thursday afternoons to spend a couple of hours with the 50 or so members of NASCA.
For anyone who’s done time, or even worked in a prison, I’m sure I can’t do a description of it any justice. But for all those people who’ve never been inside, let me share a few impressions.
You can prepare yourself for the security check. Empty your pockets into a locker. Walk through a metal detector. Get frisked. Maybe sit down in the back room and have the German Shepherd sniff you. I love dogs, but keep cool. The K-9 cop really doesn’t like it when you talk to the dog.
What you can’t prepare yourself for, however, is the first time you walk across the yard.
Of course everyone’s different and not everybody experiences the same sensations, but I guarantee you this: the first time you walk across a penitentiary yard, it will make some kind of impression on you.
In my case, I still remember thinking, This is wrong. We have a Bill of Rights, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and this feels very wrong. It may or may not be cruel, I don’t know. But it’s damn sure unusual.
During my four years of Thursday afternoons, I didn’t experience anything to change my opinion on that matter. And it’s not that I think everyone inside is a great guy who just had a bad break or made a mistake. Some, sure, but there are also some really fucked up dudes in there who have done some really awful shit.
Yet in a way, that just makes the whole thing worse. Over the course of those four years, I began to appreciate that prison is like anything else. It takes all kinds. More than you would imagine. So why are they all packed in there together? The rapists with the drug dealers with the murders with the burglars with the drunk drivers. I know it all sounds like a bunch 
of criminals to you, and on some level of course it is. But you dig a little deeper and it turns out they’re all people, which means they’re really very different. And because of that, I came to believe that jamming them all into one big compound and pairing them up in cages, creating something like a big criminal zoo, is not the best way to go. It’s not in their best interest or society’s.
So I was happy yesterday to read about the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata, which acknowledged that the unholy levels of overcrowding in California state prisons do in fact violate the 8th amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The court gave California two years to figure out how to bring its prison population down to a mere 137.5 percent of capacity. Most likely it will be through some combination of building more prisons, transferring some prisoners, and releasing others. But either way, the current facilities must reduce their numbers by between 30,000-40,000 inmates.
The case was decided by a 5-4 margin, splitting along lines that were predictable to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the court. Unusual, however, was the vociferous nature of the dissent. Justice Scalia read his minority opinion aloud from the bench, a real rarity, while swing vote for the majority Justice Kennedy just sat there and grimaced.
One of the dissenters’ main complaints is that this is a sloppy, piecemeal decision that allows the majority to wash its hands of the issue and whatever consequences may flow from it.
Although I fundamentally support the majority, I partially agree with the dissent. Because as bad as the situation is in California (and it’s really, really bad), shuffling around 30,000 people is only a band-aid.
What neither side was willing to address is that prisons themselves are the real problem. The system is not only broken, but ill-conceived. Prisons are a modern adaptation of the mediaeval dungeon, and it’s time for us to come up with smarter and better systems for dealing with most criminals.