Time for a New Kind of Independence

Independence Day is almost upon us, and it is time for another revolution.

Arise, Patriots, and take back your country and truly make it better.

I understand the position of the House Speaker in the matter of impeachment, but we know now that day after day after day until November 2020 there will be more outrages.

More human rights abuses.

More attacks by domestic terrorists and killings of African-Americans by police, more judicial homicides.

More cozying up to ruthless dictators, and more historical allies who do not trust us.

More legislation not being passed by the Senate because the Senate President won’t bring anything to a vote that might actually make better for people in this country.

More millions and millions of dollars spent on golfing weekends, bringing family grafters on expensive overseas trips, more cheating on taxes.

More incarceration in for-profit prisons.

More election interference. More voter suppression.

More ecological devastation and contracts given to pollution-causing corporations. More public and indigenous land taken.

Need I say, more lies, lies, lies?

The longer this cancer is allowed to metastasize, the longer it will take for the country to recover, and we may not have the time.

Do not think that we can go back to where we were pre-Trump. Ask any African-American or indigenous person how that was working out for them. We were still basically a white supremacist society, and until we repent, reconcile, and make reparations, we will always be one. We not only have to clean up the mess of the last four years, we have to clean up the mess of the last 400+ years.

Do we have the will to do so?

Do we have the resilience to face the future if we do NOT do so?

American Imprisonment

American journalists Shane M. Bauer and Joshua F. Fattal left a notorious Iranian prison in 2011 after two years in captivity. A third journalist, Sarah Shourd, had already been released in 2010 after the three, who were reporting from Iraq, took a suggested hike and found themselves being accused of having crossed into Iran as spies.

Bauer, who is now married to Shourd, gives a brief account of the ordeal in his book, American Prison, an account of his real undercover exploit as a guard in a for-profit prison in Louisiana.

Possibly Bauer, who works for Mother Jones Magazine, is the only person who could truly sum up the brutality of a private prison because he already knew what prison brutality could be like.

And in fact, there were factors in the American prison that he called worse than what he experienced in the Iranian prison.

American Prison,  A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, released this fall, was named in The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2018.

Just when it seemed that there was hope for prison reform under President Obama, the country fell into the abyss of the Trump regime and the Sessions Justice Department. While Bauer’s experience happened in 2014, there was hope that the tide against mass incarceration and imprisonment for profit might turn.

Instead we have more imprisonment for profit, called detaining young immigrants, and rollback of sentencing laws.

Bauer’s book about one of the prisons operated by Corrections Corporation of America (since renamed CoreCivic) is a painful but, in my opinion, necessary read. One will not be surprised that many of the worst abuses are against African-American prisoners. There are no legitimate efforts made to rehabilitate prisoners, and medical attention is applied sparingly because it cuts the profits. Prisoners have died from neglect.

Perhaps the worst is the utter hopelessness that is reflected in Bauer’s voice at the situation prisoners find themselves in. He describes an inmate nicknamed Corner Store who spends a year beyond his sentence in Winn, Louisiana, because his mother lives out of state and the prison provides him with no help in finding a situation in Louisiana that he can be released to.

If possible, even more frightening is Bauer’s own reactions to being a guard. He starts out trying to be empathetic but finds himself becoming hardened as time goes on to a point where he is writing up prisoners for trivial abuses of the Draconian regulations and beginning to not care a damn about the human beings he is hurting.

Bauer underwent this transformation in only four months, before his photographer was discovered on the jail’s property and Bauer and Shroud skedaddled. The photographer was locked up in Winn; Mother Jones’s lawyer was able to get him released.

For-profit prisons operate on a state level, contracting with the state for prisoners. But we can guess that both state and federal prisons are badly in need of reform, as are mandatory sentencing and over-sentencing. Michelle Alexander began the discussion with The New Jim Crow; Bryan Stevenson continued it with Just Mercy. Paul Butler advocates for prison reform in Chokehold, and I’m sure there are other books out there that I not read that advocate the same.

The point is, these books will continue to need to be written until the United States looks at incarceration and sentencing from a true point of justice and not from a point of vengeance.