After Being Denied A Visit To A Prisoner, Journalist Reveals How Unfair And Cruel US Prison Rules Are

Many prisons around the world get a bad rep for having (and fostering) a brutal environment inside and further crime outside its confines. I get it, prison shouldn’t be a nice or fun place. However, it doesn’t mean that it should also actively fail in its main goal of correcting criminal behavior by making inmate life—and the lives of their loved ones—a living hell.

A twitter user has recently shared a string of tweets about her experience accompanying a woman to see her loved one in prison. The two ladies made extensive efforts to see this person, only to be rejected and shown how harshly inmates are treated.

The tweets highlight a common problem in many US prisons—cruelty. Sure, there is a system in place that doesn’t look out of the ordinary on paper, but in practice, it is all arbitrary. There was no reason for any of the people in this story to be denied visitation, yet there was and it seems shady.

Besides this incident, there were also reports of prisoners being denied phone calls and letters being returned to the senders with the inmates never knowing that they were delivered in the first place.

Apart from prisons being a horrible place for inmates to be in, it is also a huge struggle for loved ones. If this continues, families lose touch with their imprisoned kin in the long run.

The tweets stress that this isn’t a one-off situation: it is just one day in a single prison in one of fifty states. The prison system is nothing but a large machine of cruelty disguised as justice.

The US is notorious for its prison system, which currently houses over 2.3 million inmates across 6,843‬ institutions. It is reported that over 40% of criminals commit another crime within their first year of release. The US is currently number 1 in the whole world in lock-ups per capita—698 per 100,000 residents.