Sicko, but about prisons
If you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, I encourage you to check it out. Realizing that Americans have a hard time really understanding what socialized medicine in Europe actually looks and feels like, Moore travels to several other countries (the UK, France, Cuba, and Canada) and brings us direct footage of things like someone checking out of the hospital and not owing any money, indeed, being given cab fare home. I found it to be a stunning film that transformed my abstract understanding of these different system practices into visceral awareness. It performed quite well at the box office, and was found to be influential on Americans’ views on health policy.
I’m mentioning this now because I would love to see Michael Moore create something like Sicko that would compare American and European criminal justice systems. Various American delegations of journalists, corrections officials, advocates and others have taken profoundly impactful trips to Germany, Norway, Portugal, and other places over the years, experiencing deep surprise and some shame around the extreme contrast between humane practices in Europe and dehumanizing, cruel, and at times torturous one in America, none of which are necessary for or even conducive to making communities safer. These are critically important trips that should continue; they are also infrequent, expensive, and small.
The experience of witnessing the shocking contrast between European and American prisons needs to be brought to a much broader audience, which has shown that it is hungry for solutions and alternatives. Such a film could demonstrate the day to day realities of these functional alternative systems operating in Europe. We would see not only that they are cleaner, brighter, more humane spaces (see the comparison picture below, with a US prison cell next to one from Norway), but that the people in them are healthier, less traumatized, and fare more likely to contribute to building a healthy and humane society.
To be clear, people in American prisons are still managing to connect to their humanity, even under very difficult conditions, as evidenced by innumerable in-prison writing workshops, theater performances, art shows, TEDx talks and similar. What the European comparison would show is that it is practical and effective to lean into and embrace this humanity, rather than trying to deny it. This means dramatically shrinking the number of people sent to confinement, and dramatically altering the treatment of those who remain. Punitive, cruel prisons are a choice we do not have to make – to paraphrase Rashad Robinson, they are not only sad but deeply unjust. If more Americans were able to see this contrast on film and grasp how fundamentally non-punitive European prisons are, they might just start to believe that it’s possible to do it here.