PRISON VIOLENCE

Prisons are violent places. Violence can occur unexpectedly or with planned execution. Several things are fairly certain about prison violence: it is generally sloppy, death is not produced easily, and there is always someone to tell what happened.

For example, on January 21, 2025, a Georgia inmate in the Macon State Prison named Jonathan Finley was beaten beyond recognition resulting in his death and a second unidentified inmate was killed in an unexplained manner the same day. Last month a third inmate, Marquell Smith, was also killed at the prison. Details surrounding his killing were likewise not made public. And earlier this week a fourth inmate was found dead in the prison, presumably from foul play although prison officials are not releasing any details about the death.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote that, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

The Macon State Prison, like most other penal facilities in Georgia and throughout the Confederate states, is a dirty, violent hellhole where the rule of force governs the inmate world and power of corruption controls the prison staff.

A violent prison is always corrupt, at every level and in every nook ‘n cranny.

But can the degree of civilization in America be judged by its prisons?

Yes, it can—even in those states that want to make the country “great again” by resurrecting the Civil War and re-litigating the War of 1812.

In 2008, there were 40 inmates killed in state or federal prisons. That number increased to 143 in 2019. In 2008, there were 16,272 murders committed in the U.S. That number increased to 16,425 in 2019. The 2019 murder rate increased to 19,252 in 2023—the latest year murder statistics are available.

So, a reasonable argument can be made that American prisons do mirror reflect the degree of civilization in the U.S. today.

Take for example the case of two innocent, well-intentioned women who entered California’s Mule Creek State Prison to have overnight conjugal visits (officially called “family visits”) with their husbands—both of whom are convicted murderers serving life sentences. One of the men is actually serving four life sentences. The inmates married the women while in prison in order to have conjugal visitation with them—only to end up strangling both of them to death last year during conjugal visitation.

Tragic, no doubt.

But, again, those tragic murders mirror American society.

In 2023, there were more than 900 spousal murders in the U.S.

America’s television air waves are saturated with a host of television shows, including entire networks, dedicated to murder—most dealing with spousal murders, particularly husband-on-wife killings.

The historical greatness the MAGA people refer to was fueled by individual violence, territorial conquest, and racial subjugation. Today America is talking about taking Greenland, Panama, and Canada by violent force if necessary to make them either a state or territory.

Same old song at the same dance.

And in American prisons across the U.S. landscape—like the Macon State Prison—the Boogaloo gang is talking about taking the weight pile from the Rum-Dum gang. That’s what got Zackaria Lux, the leader of Aryan Warriors, and two of his gang buddies killed last August in a gang fight in Nevada’s Ely State Prison. The Border Huskies, or whatever they called themselves, did not want to give up the weight pile they had just taken from the East L.A. Street Corners.

But after watching a couple of old episodes of Forensic Files and a few Daytime Datelines you may want to consider the prison weight pile as a vacation choice.

Whatever you decide, don’t visit the Confederacy.