Incarcerated people are more than inmates

“You forget that you’re inmates.”

I overheard a program provider make that statement recently in Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), and I was a bit taken aback by it. I mean, one of the pillars of the California Model is normalization, which is supposed to make life inside a carceral facility as close as possible to life outside.

Under that pillar and just based on human decency, incarcerated individuals should be treated with respect and dignity. Nowhere in the statement I overheard is dignity or respect.

The term inmate is an interesting one. When I arrived at Sybil Brand Institute in 1996 — a Los Angeles County women’s jail no longer in use — I quickly learned that “inmate” was a disparaging term. To be an inmate was to be someone who was ignorant, uneducated, and who engaged in “dry snitching” — indirectly telling on a peer — to name a few.

Over the years, that knowledge was reinforced as I learned the perceived differences between an inmate and a convict.

I heard staff talk disparagingly about individuals they called inmates, including one staff member who snapped her fingers at one of my peers while calling her “inmate” instead of her name.

The term has been used to dehumanize and ridicule people, reinforcing that inmates are somehow less than other people in society.

Being less-than is somewhat familiar territory for women, even now. Women were once thought of as property and did not have the same rights or privileges as men. That thinking was as wrong historically as it is today.

As people, we all have rights, and we are all equal. The fact that we are incarcerated does not diminish the fact that we are still people.

Unfortunately, the program provider I overheard is probably not the only person who works at CCWF or any other prison in California who has that perspective.

I know there are California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) employees who do not agree with the California Model and would like nothing more than to go back to some of the more draconian policies that were in effect for decades.

But that is not the direction CDCR has chosen. CDCR has chosen to try something different, and we can all hope it succeeds. Being treated with dignity and respect sounds like a great thing to me, that’s for sure.

At the end of the day, we all know we’re incarcerated. We wake up every day facing challenges that many people don’t understand. We miss our loved ones, we can’t make many of our own decisions, and we can’t do much of what is normal in society. We don’t need a person who gets to leave when his or her shift is over, reminding us that we are in prison.

I hope that anyone reading this remembers that we all matter. We are all unique, special, and valuable. We mean something. Please don’t let anyone take that knowledge from you.