Former police officer gets a glimpse

The joke always goes that if you end up in prison you are going to be raped. “Hilarious” when you are 12 years old and the general concept of sex, let alone the absolute violation of sexual assault, is so profoundly uncomfortably out of your ability to comprehend that you must laugh in order to not lose your mind. Not hilarious when you consider that people that go to jail are people. Even the most frightening of those people are still people. However, while losing one’s freedom to participate in society while being rehabilitated so that one can be reintroduced into the human community should be the goal we set for our prison system, we all know that it isn’t. In fact, we all know—and accept—that prisons are scary places where the threat of violence, and even murder, lurk everywhere. A&E has a documentary television series called 60 Days In. The idea is to take innocent people, who volunteer, and send them into prisons undercover. The things that are revealed to these law-abiding citizens, experiencing it in three-dimension, are revelatory. Business Insider has a breakdown of some of the more life-changing experiences of some of the participants.

A police officer from Texas named Alan spent eight weeks undercover in a jail as part of "60 Days In," the A&E documentary series that sent nine law-abiding citizens to go undercover at Atlanta's Fulton County Jail. And when he got out, he said, he quit the force and became a car salesman. "I couldn't go to bed at night knowing that if I stopped somebody with a little dime bag of weed, I were to arrest them and put them in a place like that — I wouldn't be able to live with myself," he said.

That’s stark analysis of what our drug laws mean to people who end up incarcerated as a result of them. It’s also an environment that creates and reinforces the white supremacist, aggressive, oppressive, dead-end relationships that people who are disenfranchised experience in the real world—the very reason they are in prison in the first place.