Our American Gulags

The NY Times editorial below only touches on the surface of the effects of incarceration on families. I recently saw a statistic to the effect that there are approximately 5 children of prisoners for each 4 imprisoned -- more than 2 million currently. A mother or father does not stop being that when incarcerated. One hears sad tales of very young ones banging on the Plexiglas windows during a prison visit, desperately trying to make contact with an imprisoned parent.

To make things even more harsh than the report here -- yes, I, too, receive inflated cost collect calls sometimes from former students in jail -- most of the drug arrests in NYC have been focused in 5 minority communities -- rural areas with a sheriff and deputy are more or less exempt as are the suburbs and more prosperous areas in NYC, as anyone will recognize who has served on a drug arrest grand jury can testify (I was on one for a month). Our prisons constructed to accommodate the Rockefeller draconian drug laws -- some 17 or 18(?) during the Pataki administration years -- have largely been located in the far reaches of NY state -- many near the Canadian border. Such provide jobs for area residents there displaced from their former industrial and other blue collar jobs. But the costly bus trips over hundreds of miles at great expense for a family that has lost a bread winner for a brief hour or so visit through bars, windows, or in a closely monitored settings, are virtually prohibitive and guaranteed to end off family ties of the most intimate and caring kinds. I am particularly aware of particulars here, as a young group of kids with which I worked in West Harlem in the late 1950s as a student, nearly all spent time in our prisons -- and mostly died violently by their forties -- some were in the Attika rebellion where a number of prisoners were killed in a prison revolt:

http://www.deepdishtv.org/lockdown/attica/atticahomelp.html

One of these, Shorty -- the little guy who always made people laugh -- survived by hiding under dead bodies of prisoners and finally committed suicide by jumping out of a window head first in a housing project.

Our prison system in the U.S. is the most brutal of the developed nations'. The guard at our Brooklyn 'gulag' where undocumented aliens were brutalized was one of those convicted of abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo -- where presumably American prison guard tactics were transferred and are now characterized by the rest of the world as torture.

We now have the highest percentage of persons imprisoned in the U.S. of any nation in the world -- 1/4 of the world's prison population with 1/20 of its total population. We are releasing annually something in the order of 640,000 prisoners -- but have largely discontinued the means for rehabilitating prisoners (college courses and job training) practiced in civilized countries which see prison as a place either to incapacitate dangerous ones or to rehabilitate those capable of rejoining society in a productive way. Needless to say the costs for such massive imprisonment are sky high in comparison to the gains both economically and for persons and their families that rehabilitative programs could offer.

Seeing criminals as children of the devil seems to be the current American religion -- and perhaps those who are running things know full well the criminal characteristics that all too many of them are, themselves, manifesting -- on with those criminal investigations of our pols -- here, there, and elsewhere.

And a sad footnote here -- as many as 10% of those imprisoned are suffering from mental illnesses more frequently than not without the medications necessary to maintain sanity or the protections against abuses to which such disabled people are subjected by both guards and fellow inmates. Those gang raped are labeled "chickens" in the prison vernacular. One young father of two convicted of a minor crime and so abused committed suicide shortly after his release from prison.

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Keeping in Touch With a Parent in Prison

States should not be in the business of bleeding low-income families - and fraying already fragile family ties - to pay for services that the state itself is obligated to provide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/opinion/14sat3.html?th&emc=th

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