What Trump Going to Prison Should Look Like

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in prisons, and not for the reasons that literally anyone who has ever met me, even for a minute, would assume.

For the first 17 years of my career I was a lawyer and I would sometimes visit my incarcerated clients (hey, I never said I was a GOOD lawyer). Then, I spent the next 18 years as a legislator, and I would frequently visit my colleagues in prison. Plus, legislators are often given tours of prisons in order to convince us that we should make more things illegal so we can ensure that our jails remain open and full.

All of this exposure to our penal system has given me a good sense of what prison is like, how it is structured, what it’s limitations are and what the inherent risks to inmates are. I’ve written a good deal about this as part of a book I’m working on called “Prison is no Picnic. That’s why they Call it Prison, and not Picnic”.

There is no doubt that being incarcerated sucks (the title of Chapter four!). But then again, it’s kind of supposed to. We can have a long debate about whether making prison really sucky serves the purposes of rehabilitation and reduces recidivism, and whether those are even the correct goals. But jails in America are designed to be dehumanizing places, which makes them intrinsically dangerous.