It’s Utterly Inhumane

A number of people have taken up the sisters’ cause, including Ben Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., who is trying to help secure a pardon from Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi. “It makes you sick to think that this sort of thing can happen,” he said. “That these women should be kept in prison until they die — well, that’s just so utterly inhumane.” Bob Herbert - New York Times

This quote is about a case in Mississippi were two young women were sentenced to life in prison for allegedly being involved in a robbery that involved $11.00 and no one was injured. Only in Mississippi could this happen according to the article and while I can sympathize with the plight of these two young women, one of whom has lost the function of her kidneys. There is an even greater inhumanity taking place in every state in this country.

The inhumanity that I am speaking of involves the systematic disenfranchising of young black and minority men. It takes place when these young men are arrested for oftentimes minor drug offenses and given felony convictions. These convictions then condemn these young men many of them before the age of 20 to a life of poverty. Think about that; for the next 40 to 50 years these young men will be discriminated against in employment, education, and housing. You see the only group in America that you can discriminate against with impunity is the convicted felon population.

You see we now have laws that prevent convicted felons regardless of the offense from receiving student loans and grants, housing assistance, and any other government assistance that they desperately need to change their lives and become reconnected to their community and our society. As if that were not enough most employers refuse to hire ex-offenders as a matter of policy except for menial low wage positions. No one challenges an employer for doing so, because we have the canard that most businesses have money and property on hand and the ex-offender cannot be trusted to be an honest person. After all, they are convicted felons. So we prevent them from receiving the support to change their lives and we won’t give them jobs to improve their lives, many of them for nothing more than having a bag of weed.

By condemning these young men to this fate of hardship we are also condemning the neighborhoods they live in to a future of violence and apathy. Once you remove the hope and the future of the young people in a community you suck the rejuvenating life blood out of that community. These young men now exist outside the system and the economy. They have been made invisible by a system designed to marginalize them and prevent them from competing successfully for their share of the American dream. These young men now have no reason to become involved in the improvement of their communities and often times their own lives. Many are not allowed or don’t vote. Many are unemployed. Many are not fathers to their own children and so the cycle continues.

What I think fails to get mentioned enough is that we are not only condemning these young men but entire communities to suffering. We set in motion the demolition of the underpinnings of these communities. Throughout history the fortunes of a culture or a community is driven by the fortunes of its young men and if you are able to somehow undermine those young men you in fact commence the destruction of that culture or community. You show me a vibrant community and I will show you one where the young men are intricately involved in the fabric of that community. Our community cannot afford to allow this destruction of our young men to go on unabated.

Just one galling statistic of many: in some states African Americans comprise 90 percent of the total drug prisoners and are 57 times more likely to be incarcerated for a drug offense than whites, even though whites use five times the amount of drugs as African Americans. - Michelle Alexander

The time has come for us to stand up and demand an end to this systematic destruction of our young men. We must begin to change a criminal justice system that routinely and selectively gives our young men felony convictions while at the same time giving whites diversion and other less punitive measures. We must begin to teach and train our young men to not participate in their own destruction. The training of our young men into responsible men is not being advocated and promoted as it should be in our community. There is this false assumption that boys just naturally grow into men, nothing could be further from the truth.

There will be racist elements who will seek to keep this pipeline in place. But in addition there will also be economic forces to contend with. Prisons now employ over 400,000 people throughout the country. Because many prisons are located in rural areas they have replaced other forms of employment such as manufacturing and farming. This source of jobs has kept many small towns afloat following the shrinking manufacturing and unskilled labor base. We now have a prison-industrial complex second only to the military in its size and scope. In order for prisons to be profitable they have to be filled. As a result of these policies we are pitting the employment and future of rural folks against the freedom and future of the urban folks.

As a society we cannot continue to operate on this level. The results of our inaction will be a permanent underclass in urban areas and a permanent siege mentality for those living there. It will also continue to foster and promote racial and geographical prejudice within our society. With two million of our fellow citizens incarcerated or on paper many for non-violent offences we must begin to seek and to promote alternative methods to incarceration and felony records. We should also support an atmosphere of support for second chances for these unfortunate people caught up in this “war” mentality. Businesses respond to customers and if customers were more receptive to second chances so would the business community. I ask you to begin speaking out in your communities for these young men. Become a part of the reentry movement where you live. You see condemning people before they are even 20 for a non-violent drug offense to a life of poverty is not just unfair or inhumane, it is immoral.

“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo-obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.” - Angela Davis

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You Can Get With This Or You Can Get With That

Editorial columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote an interesting piece discussing the true cost of the Iraq War. According to a Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz and the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Robert Hormats the Iraq War will cost at least 3 trillion dollars. This figure includes cost which are never reported by the media or discussed by politicians. The truth is that the cost of a war is more than the money spent on men and material, as if it were some business venture that can be tallied with a nice spreadsheet and budget. In today’s world, war is packaged like a corporate enterprise complete with sanitized videos and reporting to make it more palatable to the disinterested masses.

Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”[1]

There should be a Constitutional Amendment that states, “no President can declare war without instituting a draft”. The problem today is that so many of us are unaffecting by the war in any personal and meaningful way. Oh sure we know people are dying, but they are strangers for the most part. Many of them who have received the least from this society are being asked to sacrifice the most. Yes, they are volunteers, but make no mistake about it for many in our society the choices are so limited that it is no longer a choice. For many of them it is a roll of the dice for maybe a better future and some better choices. Because they are brought home in secret we are never confronted by their deaths. I have never understood why we honor “our bravest” by secretly sneaking them back into the country following their greatest sacrifice. Is this how we honor our fallen heroes? This amendment would at least force the politicians who are tough on security to consider the fact that their children would be subject to the same opportunity to be heroes as those they so flagrantly send into harm’s way. It would also force us as a nation to debate the merits of any action being contemplated in our name, knowing that these decisions would affect all of us in a very personal way.

Instead of pouring 2 trillion dollars down the black hole that is Iraq, here are a few things we could have done right here in the good ole USA. We could have put an end to the partisan debacle that is Social Security for 50 years or more. And based on the Senate committee’s own spending calculations we could have enrolled 58,000 more kids into Head Start for a year with just what we are spending on one day of the war. We could also have enrolled an additional 160,000 low income students into college through Pell Grant funding for a year. Not in the calculations is how many of our fellow citizens we could have provided with healthcare insurance using this money.

Here is what I don’t understand we fight and we argue over providing support for those among us who are less fortunate and yet we spend this ungodly amount of money without batting an eye. What does it say about a country that spends trillions of dollars to kill people, but won’t spend any money to insure the healing of its own people. And to make matters worse one of the nominees for the next President considers the money well spent and wants to spend more. I don’t even blame Bush, McCain, or any of the other warmongers they are only doing what they do. I blame the American public for putting up with this crap. We have an economy that is in recession because we have allowed Bush to fight a war by mortgaging the future of our kids. We have allowed the politics of fear and false patriotism to trump democracy. In modern America war is good. Universal healthcare is bad. Free education is bad. Laying the groundwork for the neediest Americans with pre-school funding, tax credits and college grants, or employment training all bad.

Why is war good? It is good because it fuels the transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the wealthiest. It fuels the military-industrial complex and the war profiteers who in turn feed the lobbyists, who in turn purchase the politicians. You can’t spend all that money on war material and preparation and not use it. We must begin to cut our defense budget. We have spent all of this money on defense and it could not nor can it prevent 9/11 or any other terrorist type of attack regardless of the lies being spread to the contrary. This isn’t about look at all the wrong that America has done, it is about look at all the good America could do with a change in focus.

Of course there is also the toll that war takes on people’s lives through absences, injuries, and deaths. How can one calculate those costs? The loss of a parent, a brother, or son does not fit tidily into a balance sheet. The loss of a limb, a mind, or the trust in one’s government cannot be found in the defense budgetary process. How long will we continue to justify these types and sizes of expenditures for death and ignore the suffering going on right next door with our neighbors. You can get with the war or you can get with life, the choice belongs to all of us.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?em&ex=1204779600&en=c44ca333e64258c9&ei=5087%0A

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