PRISONERS ARE PRISONERS - BY ANY OTHER NAME

Recently, I posted an article on this site titled PRISON IS PRISON - BY ANY OTHER NAME. Thinking about this a bit further, I realized it's not only the Place which is objectified and politicized, it's the people as well.

In that article, I wrote:

"In almost every discussion about prisons in "unfriendly" nations, the dialogue is about "political" prisoners, though the official position in the US is that there are no political prisoners in American prisons - only criminals. Despite the dialogue, the same holds true in foreign lands, with those governments too claiming that only duly convicted criminals populate their prisons."

An American female basketball player is caught red-handed with drugs in an international airport and a former US Marine is duly and legally convicted of espionage (and other crimes) in Russian courts, yet the american populace allows the Biden administration and the media to characterize those prisoners as upstanding citizens worthy of trading for someone who the US "justice" system has determined to be a criminal, duly convicted, of several murders and other crimes. Why is that?

Not too long ago, Idaho prisons confined convicts, (the term derived from persons "convicted" of crimes). Later, convicts were (appropriately) called inmates, then prisoners, then offenders.

These days, IDOC staff are instructed to refer to convicts as "residents", and in a recent memo, were referred to as [the] "judicially-involved". Finally, in a recent update to the IDOC website, prisoners are referred to as "clients". (I refer to myself either as a prisoner or "perpetually confined".)

Prisoners in many other countries are referred to by American media and officials as oppressed, dissidents and victims of unjust regimes. So too are US prisoners when viewed from abroad.