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Prison Basketball Editorials |
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These editorials reflect only the personal opinions of the webmaster of "Prison Basketball" and nobody else. But we would be ready to publish your comments on ideas presented here.
The Question of Competitive vs Recreational Sports in Prisons On occasion of the mortal stabbing of an inmate as a result of a disputed basketball game
The question of competitive team sports like basketball, football, volleyball and soccer within prisons gets more criticism than recreational sports and sports practiced individually. They say competitive sports and particularly prison leagues create contention and increase the risk factor. Another type of sports that gets a lot of rap are the practice of all forms of martial arts within prison walls.
One of the most quoted examples to substantiate opposition to competitive prison sports in jails is the June 1998 incidence of an inmate indicted in fatal prison-yard stabbing. The widely circulated news item from AP talks about an inmate, Willie White, 36 at the time and interned at Trenton State Prison stabbing a fellow inmate Kenneth Mahan, 44, to death over a disputed basketball call White had made during a prison basketball game. White had refereed an inmate basketball game the morning of the attack, and apparently was angry about a challenge Mahan, who took part in the disputed game, had made to one of his calls. The killing was videotaped by the prison security cameras, but it was too late to save Mahan. A Mercer County grand jury returned a guilty verdict on White.
The death of even one person is very tragic, and is one too many. But then of course isolated incidents like this do not build a strong enough case to ban all competitive sports from prisons. Somehow a lone guy shooting hoops does not have the same effect as a 5 on 5 match would it and in 99.9% of the cases will not result in any adverse incidents. As to murders in prisons, these are a fact of life that are going to occur with or without any competitive sports being practiced in the confines of prisons. The prevention of murder incidents behind bars should be sought elsewhere.
As to competitive sports, on the contrary, instead of encouraging violence, regulated sports competitions encourage greater self-discipline and respect of laws and regulations by all parties, they promote team work and sense of fair play in prison inmates in a way individual sports will never be able to do. These are skills learned in the process of such games and have accumulating effect on general behavior. In the absence of any solid evidence, the odd incident or two here or there should not be used as a pretext to remove such activities once and for all. That would be a great shame.
Banning sports is becoming one of the most popular election campaign slogans used to win elections. But are these get-tough politicians forgetting something?
Senator Locke Burt finds fault with the Florida Department of Corrections for trying to purchase sporting goods for prisoners, including basketballs and other equipment under the cover of using prisoner "wellness funds" for the costs. "If prisoners want exercise, they can break rocks, walk the yard, or pick up trash on the side of the road. The Department knows that the Legislature's intent has been that hard time should be just that: hard time. No cable TV, no weights, and no sports. I personally don't want one dime of taxpayer money going to help violent felons improve their three-point jump shot," says the Senator running for the Attorney General's office in the state of Florida for the Republican Party.
It seems creating tougher conditions in prisons is one of the main concerns of the running senator for almost a decade. His landmark legislation in 1994 eliminated many of the perks of prison life, including weights, cable TV, VCRs, and sports equipment. Sadly, he remains Florida Senate's point man in support of the death penalty.
Senator Burt may be using political rhetoric to win his campaign for election to this position. He is also trying to fine tune the sentiments of the general public who is against distributing favors to "criminals" who should "pay" for their deeds. By playing to the sentiments of the public opinion, the Senator is spreading generalizations, exaggeration and clear misconception that what all prisoners do most of the time is to watch national television and play sports. This couldn't have been further from the truth.
True, admittedly the general public opinion does sympathize with the conservative body of thought, and understandably may fail to comprehend initially why prisoners would need recreational sports. There is clearly a problem with public perception of life in prison, particularly practicing of prison sports. The general public does not like in general that its well-earned tax money is spent on "prison perks".
Prison wardens and correction officials on the other hand say that weight rooms, basketball hoops, televisions and radio sets and other "pleasantries" accomplish two very important tasks inside a prison: They are a powerful management tool, and they occupy prisoners' time.
So a gentleman running for high office to fail to recognize the almost unmistakably positive effect that prison sports, and in particular, the game of basketball and its practice plays in improving prisoner behavior is very surprising indeed, as he must have quite a considerable body of statistical evidence to the usefulness and almost "therapeutic" effect of practicing basketball on even the most hardcore of prisoners. Prisoners who practice the game even for a short while will tell you that playing a fair game like basketball improves their self-esteem and is part of their "healing process" in reconciling with society. Effectively, prisoner basketballers are suddenly more "human" because of the game and this will greatly effect their behavior not only within the confines of prison and with other prisoner mates, but also as soon as they come out of prison. The well-known case of one Lee Benson who was able to transform his life in prison and start playing professional basketball in Israel, Cyprus and Venezuela can speak volumes on this transformation that prison basketballers can go through.
We believe that Senator Locke, win or lose, should seriously reconsider his tough position on basketball in prisons. We are not talking about a mundane matter like "improving one's jump shots" as he put it, but something far more meaningful. And contrary to common belief, prison basketball, by improving prisoner behavior and sense of fair play may actually save on public funds needed for the penal system, rather than being a burden on it...
Torture: Chinese Hang Time on Hoops Even the idea that basketball hoops are being used to punish prisoners in horrendous. But according to the "Washington Post", in China, they reportedly use this method quite frequently.
Basketball hoops are used as torture instruments in prison labor camps in China as reported by Philip P. Pan in the "Washington Post" on June 14, 2002 (page A01). The newspaper talks about Hunan Province No. 1 Prison situated on a small, nameless island that sits near where the Yuan and the Yangtze rivers meet in central China. The prison depends for its funding on its industrial factory complex manned by the prisoners -- a factory struggling to stay in business by squeezing the most from its inmate workers. Meals are meager and disease widespread. Prisoners have known to collapse after 16-hour shifts.
Surprisingly, this particular prison has the distinction of having basketball backboards and hoops. Had we known these hoops would be used for practice, we would have tended to have given the Chinese credit. But the ingenious Chinese prison guards in Hunan, who themselves sometimes go for months without pay, reportedly use the hoops to punish the inmates by handcuffing the prisoners to the hoops and letting them hang on them for hours...
Several former inmates said prisoners who fail to meet
production quotas in the prison factory or otherwise upset the
authorities for one reason or another are left to hang
with their hands handcuffed to the basketball hoops
in the prison
yards, or to the high railings in the workshops, their feet not
even touching the ground.
It gives "hang time" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?
Gentlemen! Stop using hoops as torture instruments... and stop it immediately... before doing further damage to your reputation and your credibility.
BadJocks.com and JerkOfTheWeek.com: Recommended Reads, But with a Caveat On proliferation of websites that document the often high profile descent of very successful players into mischief, legal blunder and outright criminal behavior leading to incarceration.
The world wide web is full of sites dedicated to the coverage of law infractions by famous sports figures who display ludicrous behavior both on court and off court and in a moment of human weakness, damage their own reputation and in certain cases, actually squander all their achievements outright and end up in jail... The general public is very much fascinated by mischief. This is usually intermingled with a collective vindictiveness, particularly if the culprit is a well-known figure. You almost feel how the public takes pleasure from learning the sometimes grotesque details describing the fall of athletes into disrepute. This is the lynch mob mentality. So understandably many websites will cater for this demand.
One of the most comprehensive of those sites is the aptly named "BadJocks" site at: http://www.badjocks.com/ covering all sports actually. The site also sadly includes the shameful idio-syncracies of many of our basketball players and coaches to tell you such phenomenon is universal, more so in basketball. Another site full of oddities of sports figures is the "Jerk of the Week" website at: http://www.thejerkoftheweek.com/ distributing jerk points to .. well jerks...
Contrary to what you may think though, we don't oppose such sites per se. In fact, we find them to some extent, very useful indeed, for offering a colorful catalog of exactly what athletes must "not" to do when involved in sports, be they amateurs, professionals, or in coaching positions. So we suggest everybody involved in sports (players, coaches, officials, parents) browse them and take note of what they say. They will pretty much know the pitfalls and try to stay away from such behavior (if they possibly can...) Thus the educational role of such sites (even though they may not have intended to act as one..)
But our "Prison Basketball" site becomes inadvertently involved, when people try browsing the search engines for the purpose of coming across such "juicy" documentation (for example by typing "prison+basketball" on Google Search). But instead of finding such a scandal sheet as they expected, they are somewhat surprised to come across instead, to our "Prison Basketball" website as the first recommended source by Google.
When they check the contents of "Prison Basketball" though, they are surprised to be led to an altogether contrary direction - and they start to wonder why. They even sometimes send us e-mails on this? Why to have a prison basketball website anyhow, they ask? We explain to those who contact us, that ever since our launch, we have made a conscious effort to stay away from coverage customary to sites like "BadJocks" and "The Jerk of the Week" and to concentrate on the actual practicing of the game of basketball behind bars as an effective way of improving one's situation in the long road to a healthier life, rehabilitation and redemption while spending jail time. That's where we find our raison-d'etre and that's why our site tries to propagates such positive values rather than picking on the frivolities of athletes.
We also warn our callers that while browsing the scandal sheets, they need to take things they find there with a pinch of salt. Without belittling the gravity of some of the reported blunders and acts of indecency or outright crimes by our sportsmen and sportswomen, there is a valid argument that such focused and targeted and perpetual coverage by such scandal websites falls suspiciously in the trap of stereotyping. Such coverage also reinforces the misguided perception among the general public that sports of all sorts are rampant with such illegalities. This is a slippery road to wrong generalizations.
An excellent rebuttal of our prejudgmental misconceptions about this can be found in a "SportsJones" article dated entitled June 7, 2000 and entitled "Just the Facts Ma'am" where the writer Jeff Meron argues for example that the percentage of NBA athletes falling into problems with the law is, contrary to popular belief, actually much much less than the rate in the general population, and that the main reason we are made aware of them all the time is not their frequent occurrence, but basically the high profile of those who committed those acts. In a certain number of times, the story may have even been an orchestrated smear campaign on the unsuspecting athlete or is the result of a carefully planned get-rich scheme by some shady individuals to extract money from them.
That's why I strongly suggest that while following the development of such stories in the media with interest, that we do so with a cautious and critical mind, rather than with a lynch mob mentality. One of those days, we may even decide to make a well-organized summary, a sort of a catalog of such incidents and distribute them for free to all those involved in sport, be they players, parents, coaches, administrators or social workers so that they avoid the possible pitfalls of falling into trap be it as perpetrators or as victims.
PS: I am so grateful to BadJocks.com site for acknowledging our Prison Basketball output on their popular website. In the section "Fun Stuff", they write: "Prison Basketball website is blasting our site for our PenitentiaryNBA article http://www.badjocks.com/penba.htm saying - BadJock's attempt at humor at the expense of prison basketball... A dispatch from the Disassociated Press news agency... if there is such a thing". And they at BadJocks very conveniently published a link to our page that has thankfully forwarded some extra traffic from their very popular and frequently visited site to our much less-known "Prison Basketball" site. We thank BadJocks for being that attentive to what we said...
Please send in your comments to prisonbasketball@yahoo.com
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