Both Boo and Piper face a similar dilemma, they both refuse to closet themselves even at the expense of alienating their families. Coming out (and in Boo’s case refusing to back down from her truth) is obviously a very important process. I totally and absolutely love the statement that the show is making here.

However, for many prisoners, this only presents half of the honesty dilemma that they most regularly face. Usually, prisoners are caught between the parole consequences of remaining in denial and the family and extended family support that can be imperiled by admitting guilt.

One of the most important elements of the in prison therapy to parole board hearing to being granted parole process for most prisoners is proving to the therapist and the parole board that you are not “in denial” about your crime or crimes.

One of the most shocking things about, for instance, OJ Simpson’s recent parole hearing was that he was granted parole despite his continual refusal to take full responsibility during the publically broadcast parole hearing (every single former prisoner I know was totally dumbfounded by Nevada’s evidence-driven parole process).

For most prisoner’s I knew and for me, the keys to parole were to complete all required (and sometimes the unofficially required but still necessary) programming and to take full responsibility for any and all crimes that we had pled guilty to.

I suspect this sounds eminently reasonable (to anyone who has never been incarcerated) but it is often one of the trickiest moral dilemmas that a prisoner confronts in prison.

Believe it or not (and most don’t) there are many logical reasons why prisoners don’t want to take full responsibility for the full slate of charged crimes which they were found or pled guilty to. This list includes (but is not limited to):

* Over 90% of cases are resolved by plea bargain. Most plea bargains happen under immense pressure. As I have explained a few times before, people are charged with a much larger number of crimes than they actually commit because for each committed crime there is a larger number of statutory prohibitions.

In other words, if I were to commit an armed robbery I could be charged with: Armed Robbery, Robbery, Assault, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Using a Weapon in Commission of a Crime, and a ton of other ‘names’ for the same crime.

So, you are handed a ‘charging document’ and your one crime has been multiplied by a massive number of named offenses. The prosecutor will go to your lawyer and say, “if your client pleads guilty to X number of counts he or she will reduce the number of charges to a lower total number (and they will specify which specific ‘names’ you have to plead guilty to).”

“However,” they will continue, “if your client does not take the plea, we will charge you with every single charge from your charging document and push for the maximum time on every charge for which your client is found guilty of (which usually means you would do decades of time).”

So, plea bargains are kind of a shotgun arrangement, the system stacks the deck so that it is in the interest of every single accused criminal to accept a plea bargain. The plea bargain system is a shell game created to allow the system to process a number of ‘criminals’ that is far in excess of the court system’s actual capacity to host trials.

There are many causes of mass incarceration, but the plea bargain system is one of the foundational elements that make it possible for mass incarceration to exist.

This is why I often say that while every person who is charged by a prosecutor likely committed some offense, it is unlikely that they are guilty of all the crimes they were charged with or with all of the charges that they pled guilty to.

Sometimes, because of the brutal experience of having to plead guilty to crimes we didn’t commit (in order to avoid facing the totality of an artificially inflated charging document) it becomes particularly painful (and even traumatic) to have to OWN and show ‘real remorse’ for every one of those charges to prison officials, therapists, and/or parole board members.

* Prison is a very hard place to survive and that survival can be easier when you have money and/or emotional support from friends and family members. Often, the support relationships that exist are sustained by the belief, by the people on the outside, of the innocence of the friend of the family member on the inside. To admit guilt, for many prisoners, would cut them off from all of their support. Imagine if you were in prison and you were going to be released if you admitted guilt, what would you do if the only place you could live upon release was with someone who would shun you if they felt you were guilty?

Again, often, ‘denial’ in this case is a rational choice related to maintaining necessary emotional and material support. It is quite possible that someone in prison internally takes full responsibility for their crimes, but for entirely rational reasons refuses to take any form of officially sanctioned admission of guilt.

Hopefully, this gives you an idea of why a refusal to publicly admit guilt doesn’t necessarily translate into a lack of remorse or into someone actually refusing to take responsibility for their crimes.

Private Prisons

So, most likely, we will be talking a great deal about the private prison industry from this point on (it is one of the major driver’s of the rest of season 3 and all of season 4).

Oddly enough, because Private Prisons have been such an unmitigated disaster in practice, true private prison industry was in decline until recently. The companies, and corporate interests, involved in private prisons were starting to shift money from prisons to mass supervision (parole, probation, monitoring, and housing of released prisoners), video visitation, and prison health insurance (among other ‘innovations’).