Happy New Year???

by Corey John Richardson

 Happy New Year, Cell Door readers,

 It’s 2009. And the sky is falling. California has a budget short fall of $15 billion and at the time of this writing needs $2 billion within 30 days just to keep the state running, otherwise its lOUs to creditors and state employees. Kentucky with only 4-plus million people has a shortfall of around a billion dollars. States around the U.S. are in the same predicament: falling tax revenues and rising costs to keep a state functioning. Unemployment claims reaching record highs, thousands of stores closing, the DOW has taken the worst hit in history, and still we keep locking people up at ever- increasing rates (see last issue’s article, WE’RE #1 IN THE U.S. FOR INCARCERATION). How can this go on?

Kentucky has the answer: deeper education cuts and further reductions in social services which are needed now more than ever. Anyone who has seriously studied the problem of “crime” (a loosely used term) and its immediate consequence, incarceration, can tell you this one clear fact: illegal activity and subsequent imprisonment can be prevented through education and social services.

Of course, this is a rather straight—forward conclusion, but many in government have been easily swayed to spend the bulk of our tax revenues on those twin sisters, Military and Corrections. Simply put, a man or woman who has a decent education can secure a job with a living wage. A living wage not only brings self-respect, it alleviates the need to rob a convenience store, burglarize a home, or stand on the street corner all night to sell $20 worth of dope.

Well, education is being cut further in prisons also — as are the budgets for medical, dental, food, etc. So, upon release, a man or woman has very little to show for their 10, 15, or 20-plus years of prison time. They, by-in-large, end up unhealthy, under-educated, psychologically-traumatized, and fit for little more than exactly what brought them to prison in the first place. Sadly, to those raised in the middle-class mindset, the utterly inevitable sojourn of a significant proportion of those of the lower socio—economic stratum to prison is hard to fathom. Barely a footnote in any undergraduate sociology course.

I watched the 2008 presidential race like a rabid dog. Not once did I hear any serious discussion about the historic exponential growth of the U.S. prison system. A phenomenon that is emptying our coffers as well as our nation’s very soul. The president-elect did mention on the campaign trail, from the pulpit on Father’s Day no less that Black men should be more “responsible” fathers. I thought, it’s rather hard from a prison cell (one out of every three black men in the U.S. can expect to serve time in prison). I wondered also who that comment was truly for; Black men or the voting public.

All the rhetoric about Change and Hope from the Left and about Patriotism and National Strength from the Right was lost on me I’m afraid, because the outlook looks the same once again. You see, the financial strain hitting the U.S. has not in any way dampened the enthusiasm for incarceration. In Kentucky, the state’s association of prosecutors is fighting any reasonable changes to habitual offender laws. Professor Robert Lawson who helped write Kentucky’s Persistent Offender Laws over three decades ago says that they are being misused by prosecutors. The tool to lock-up repeat violent offenders has in effect been used to lock away an entire class of people. A man was arrested on a misdemeanor charge and found to have had a single gram of cocaine. With Kentucky’s PFO law, the man received a 20 year prison term. This and many other cases were cited in Prof. Lawson’s Kentucky Law Journal study as reported by the Louisville Courier—Journal (see Repeat offender law crowds prisons, 11/17/08). Although Kentucky expects a growth in its prison population of an incredible 50%, it recently voted down a prison expansion due to costs. Where these new prisoners will go is anyone’s guess.

So, like the old Talking Heads song goes, “Same as it ever was.” We maniacally lock up people as if it’s some panacea to solve all of our nation’s ills (with just about 5% of the world’s population we hold an inconceivable 25% of the world’s prisoners). We obsessively watch crime shows while tax revenues much needed for education and social services (not to mention infrastructure, healthcare, etc.) are increasingly diverted for the building and maintenance of more and more prisons — this blight on our society like a cancer which we call the Prison Industrial Complex. And as each new year rolls by, I wonder, “Is this the year that America, my America, wakes up and stops the madness.” For 2009, it doesn’t look good folks.

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