Warning: Spoilers for Detective Comics #1094Batmanhas been fighting crime in Gotham City for decades, and it seems like the GCPD are finally starting to see why Batman is necessary. Batman has been rounding up criminals for years and tossing them into either Blackgate or Arkham Asylum, and only now are the police finally asking if prisons even work.
The GCPD finally starts questioning if prison actually works in Gotham City inDetective Comics#1094 by Tom Taylor and Mikel Janín.Batmansuspects something sinister is going on in the Juvenile Detention Center known as Faultless. To get to the bottom of it, he begins investigating the prison and discovershow worthless prison really is in Gotham.
Batman has known for years that Gotham’s prison systems aren’t particularly good, but the important bit here is that Harvey Bullock, a detective in the GCPD, seems to agree with Batman, which marks a major change in the opinion of the police force.
Gotham City’s Police Force Is Recognizing How Imprisonment Works Against Everyone’s Best Interests
Detective Comics#1094 by Tom Taylor, Mikel Janín, and Wes Abbott
As Batman investigates Faultless, he discovers that the Warden is a sadistic man who intentionally tortures and unfairly punishes the inmates under his care. It’s a dark reveal, and it forces one to wonder why exactly young offenders are sent to this place. The Warden states that it’s retribution; if they’re in this prison, they surely deserve whatever they’ll get. But that “eye for an eye” attitude isn’t exactly the point of prison.Prison isn’t meant to be a system of retribution; it’s meant to be a system of rehabilitation, and it seems likethe rest of Gothamis finally waking up to that.
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Batman has known for decades that the prison system of Gotham City is broken, but it’s hard to say what more he could do to fix it.Bruce Wayne has been pumping moneyinto Gotham’s social services and systems to try and improve things, but one man on his own, no matter how wealthy, can’t just enact wide sweeping changes to a state system. Especially not when other forces at play might attempt to block him, such as the Court of Owls. But if someone like Harvey Bullock finally sees the futility of these systems, maybe things might start to change.
Arkham Asylum Is By Far the Worst Offender in Gotham City
It Actively Makes Supervillains
Faultless is a terrible place that abuses its inmates instead of reforming them. There’s no denying that,but Arkham Asylum is even worse. There have been multiple times when someone has been committed to Arkham Asylum who was perfectly sane and normal, and Arkham Asylum ended up turning them into supervillains. It’s even been suggested thatArkham Asylum is built over a literal pit to hellfrom which demons can emerge. No one incarcerated in Arkham is ever going to get the mental help they need to properly reform.
The irony of this is that it’s been suggested that Batman is actually at fault for this. Once, Arkham Asylum was just a mental hospital where people were able to get treated for their issues. But when Batman showed up, so did more and more dangerous villains in Gotham City. In response, Batman needed a place to put these often-unwell criminals, andBatman chose Arkham Asylum. The staff, overwhelmed with themed serial killers, no longer had the time to help innocent people who were just suffering. Batman took a place that was doing some good and just turned it intoanother ineffectual place of reform.
Time and again, people have tried to fix the system in Gotham, but it has never worked out…
While this seems like a hopeless situation, it might not be as bad as it seems. If the GCPD finally wakes up and realizes that reform is currently impossible with the system in place, they could work to fix it. Having the entire police force behind him to campaign would be a lot more useful than justBruce Wayne himself trying to throw moneyat the problem. Time and again, people have tried to fix the system in Gotham, but it has never worked out because it’s never had the full attention of society before.
Gotham Has Been All Too Happy to Punish Its Criminals
But That’s Not Solving the Problem
A few years ago, a new version of Arkham Asylum opened. Arkham Tower presented itself as a rebranding of the Arkham legacy that would help rehabilitate Gotham’s worst and finally start making a difference in the crime rate in Gotham City. Instead, the place ended up being a scam created to fail. The people in charge intended for the inmates to cause a riot and break free. The owners would then cash in on the insurance for easy money. This problem is one of Gotham’s biggest:no one actually cares about reforming the criminals.
Gotham City has so far been content to simply punish its villains and attempt to keep them locked away. This isn’t a solution for anyone - not for Gotham and certainly not for the villains. It’s been shown that some of Batman’s villains are capable of reforming. Both Clayface and Riddler have become heroes in the past, but this was due to the efforts of Batman, not the system that’s supposed to be reforming them. Not all ofBatman’s villains are lost causes, which makes their complete lack of support even worse.
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Changing a system from the outside is practically impossible. Batman is a vigilante; he’s not technically part of the criminal justice system. Batman knows that Arkham and Blackgate are part of a broken system, but there’s nothing he can do if his money doesn’t make a difference. Hopefully, characters like Harvey Bullock, realizing that sending these people to a prison thatabuses them isn’t going to fix anything,will start to change the system that they’re part of.
Gotham City’s Criminals Can Be Reformed with the Right Programs
But the City Needs a System in Place to Do It
There currently aren’t any options for criminals who want to reform. Blackgate Penitentiary just keeps criminals locked up until it’s time to release them with no kind of social services to help them. Faultless actively goes out of its way to torture and beat their underage inmates as a form of punishment for whatever brought them there.Arkham Asylum is the worst of the bunch, a place that’s supposed to help people with mental issues but instead drives the people brought there insane.
Saving Gotham City is a full-time job, but not everything can be solved with money. Preventing the Joker from poisoning the Gotham City water supply is great, but it doesn’t do much if the Joker breaks out every week and keeps trying to do it. The only way to solve problems is to address the root of them and solve what’s causing the problems in the first place. Curing the Joker or any of Batman’s other villains is a great solution, butBatman’svillains can’t be reformed until the prison system itself is reformed.
Detective Comics#1094is available now from DC Comics!
Batman
One of DC’s most iconic heroes, Batman is the vigilante superhero persona of billionaire Bruce Wayne. Forged by tragedy with the death of his parents, Bruce dedicated his life to becoming the world’s leading martial artist, detective, and tactician. Recruiting an entire family of allies and sidekicks, Bruce wages war on evil as the dark knight of his hometown, Gotham City.
