I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read my work, and I’m glad you’ve found some value in it as you study corrections. The people to whom I referred in this article were not serving their time in productive ways. Rather than making efforts to improve the system of corrections, they focused energy on explaining why they were not guilty and how it was an injustice that they had to live by the same rules that governed other people in prison.

Although they led careers as legislators before, they were prisoners now. I wanted them to use their influence to apprise colleagues of what they had learned about the prison experience. Instead, many of the men who formally held positions of power wanted to rail about how they felt that they had personally been wrongly convicted. They had less concern for what I considered to be a fundamentally flawed system. Those prisoners only thought about themselves. Still, I felt happy to have them in our population because their imprisonment brought attention to the system. We needed more attention to influence prison reform.

Bernard Madoff’s recent imprisonment, for example, has brought more attention to the struggles with which prisoners live than any 1,000 people who were convicted of less notorious crimes could bring. That’s why I’m pleased to see more people of influence come into the prison system.

Best wishes,
Michael Santos