What Kind Of Human Beings Are We Creating?

After spending a decade incarcerated and years afterward advocating for incarcerated people and their families, I began noticing something that troubled me deeply: prison does not confine people. It reshapes them.

The environment itself changes human behavior, emotional health, relationships, and identity in ways society rarely discusses. Over time, I came to understand that many of the struggles we see in formerly incarcerated people are not simply the result of bad decisions or criminal behavior. Many are the result of prolonged exposure to harsh, restrictive, emotionally exhausting environments that slowly wear down or destroy human beings from the inside out.

People enter prison as one person and often leave as someone emotionally wounded, hyper-alert, detached, fearful, numb, traumatized, or broken in ways they themselves struggle to explain. Some lose their ability to trust. Some lose their sense of safety. Some lose hope. Some lose their families. Some lose their emotional stability. Some lose their lives.

There are people who entered prison over nonviolent offenses, technical violations, addiction, poverty, or mistakes made during desperate moments of life and ended up experiencing years of isolation, violence, humiliation, sexual abuse, psychological deterioration, or permanent trauma. Others entered prison innocent and still left emotionally damaged by the experience itself. Many return home carrying pain they cannot name and reactions they cannot control because surviving prison often requires human beings to suppress parts of themselves that a healthy life depends on.

Yet society has become so accustomed to prisons looking and functioning the way they do that we rarely stop to ask a simple question:

What kind of human being is created by living under these conditions for years at a time? Human beings are deeply shaped by their environment. We already understand this in almost every other area of life.

When zoos or wildlife facilities house animals, there is now a widespread understanding that living beings require environments that closely resemble their natural conditions to remain psychologically and physically healthy. Animals are no longer simply placed in bare cages and left there without concern. Entire industries spend enormous amounts of time, money, and planning trying to recreate natural habitats. Trees, water, grass, shade, stimulation, movement, and familiar surroundings are considered essential because society recognizes that confinement in harsh, unnatural conditions damages living beings over time.

Even household pets are understood to require care, stimulation, emotional attention, and humane living conditions. People understand instinctively that prolonged confinement, isolation, stress, and environmental deprivation affect behavior.

Years ago, public outrage also grew around places like SeaWorld, where many people argued that large whales and other marine animals were suffering psychologically in small, artificial environments that could never truly replicate open water. Trainers themselves were injured after distressed animals lashed out in frustration and confusion. Society eventually began asking an uncomfortable question: if the environment itself is contributing to suffering and instability, then is the confinement humane for anyone involved?

That conversation revealed something important. Harmful environments create harmful outcomes. But when it comes to prisons, we often abandon that understanding completely.

Human beings are placed into concrete and steel environments filled with noise, restriction, surveillance, emotional tension, fear, isolation, and psychological pressure for years at a time. Many wake up every day to slamming doors, screaming, fluorescent lighting, conflict, lockdowns, humiliation, and emotional suppression. Some spend years without meaningful privacy, peace, healthy touch, or natural connection to life outside prison walls.

Then society acts surprised when many return home emotionally unstable, distrustful, angry, traumatized, disconnected, or psychologically exhausted.

We should not be surprised! Human beings adapt to survive their environments. However, survival and health are not the same thing, and the damage does not stop with incarcerated people. Correctional officers and prison staff are also subjected daily to these same harsh environments. They work inside spaces filled with tension, trauma, fear, aggression, suffering, emotional suppression, and constant psychological strain. Over time, many carry that stress home into their families, relationships, and communities. Some become emotionally numb. Some struggle with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, failed relationships, or emotional detachment. Others simply stop recognizing how deeply the environment has changed them.

In almost any other profession, prolonged exposure to conditions this psychologically intense would immediately trigger public concern about long-term mental health and workplace harm. Entire industries would be investigated if workers routinely operated in environments known to cause emotional deterioration, trauma, violence, and psychological instability. However, because prison culture has normalized harsh confinement, society accepts these conditions as ordinary.

That acceptance comes from something deeper than policy. It comes from cultural conditioning. Somewhere along the way, society became comfortable believing that once a person is accused, convicted, or labeled a criminal, they deserve environments that degrade rather than heal, environments that harden rather than restore, and environments that damage rather than stabilize. This is part of the reason so many communities continue to suffer cycles of hurt, with people hurting people. 

People who leave prison do not disappear. They return home. They become neighbors, parents, husbands, wives, employees, friends, and community members again. If prison environments produce wounded human beings, communities will continue to absorb the consequences of that damage for generations.

This does not mean accountability should disappear. Society has a responsibility to protect people from serious harm and violence. But accountability and dehumanization are not the same thing. Human beings can be held responsible without being psychologically destroyed in the process.

If most incarcerated people will eventually return home, then the question should not simply be how we punish people.

The question should also be:

 What kind of people are we intentionally creating through the environments we continue to defend? If we already understand that living beings deteriorate in harsh, unnatural environments, then perhaps the deeper question is why we become so comfortable accepting those conditions for human beings in the first place.

~RE/CLAIMED Magazine

By Dr. David Z. Simpson