I have long believed that the way we treat the least among us says much about who we are as a society. Our thoughtless policies, including our decades of lock-em-up-and-throw- away-the-key sentencing “reforms,” are bankrupting us physically and spiritually.
Once again it’s time to come into the 21st century.
We continue to work on HR4300 (www.hr4300.com). We believe that, with the change in administration, allowing children serving life to have a CHANCE at parole in fifteen years, has a chance at passage. Doesn’t mean that any of those juveniles will ever get parole. It just gives them the chance. With America’s parole boards as tough as they are – and peopled largely by law enforcement types – there will never be a wholesale release of the thousands of kids serving life.
August 17th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
The full report can be accessed at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/220595.pdf.
August 17th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Watching the recent discussion between Pastor Rick Warren, John McCain and Obama reminded me that we can say the same words, but they will have very different meanings to those listening. Such words or phrases as “freedom,” “truth,” “rich,” “democracy,” “strength,” “peace” or “the shining city on the hill” all sound good. We all agree on their definition, don’t we?
Not exactly.
When you dig deeper it’s apparent I would define most quite differently than at least one of the speakers.
The same can be said words like “justice.”
Many times I’ve talked with prosecutors, politicians and corrections officials and we will be saying the same words while definitely speaking separate languages.
I remember having a pleasant conversation with a “corrections officer” (They don’t like to be called guards) at a recently locked down facility. After an isolated incident involving one prisoner and one officer, the facility was overrun with Swat teams and others employing the same tactics we always use to solve our problems. Violence and intimidation. Power to crush the powerless. Prisoners had rifles trained on them while in the med line, tasers were used on innocent prisoners, prisoners were hauled off to Supermax facilities for minor or imagined infractions, and DOC’s own administrative regulations were totally ignored. In other words an atmosphere of total lawlessness and terror prevailed — albeit one-sided since only guards have weapons, and control every physical aspect of the facility. Anyway, the officer and I were talking about “stressful situations, and the need to “lower tensions.” When we spoke of the need for “mutual respect,”" a change of atmosphere,” and “adherence to the law,” I was thinking about those wholesale sweeps to “the hole” and dismissal of the Ad Regs the DOC had previously insisted were inviolate.”
Not so the officer. Between gritted teeth she said, “The prisoners have more rights than we do. They can do anything and get away with it.”
I was taken aback and quickly ended the conversation. I could have said that in my years of advocacy I have never known a prisoner to win a hearing or a grievance. (How could they? They are asking for mercy, fairness or justice from their captors. Think about its opposite– that a guard was asking for fairness from a prisoner. How would that work out?)
But what’s the point of arguing? The system is toxic and all of us involved in it breathe its poisonous air. We adjust our thinking to accomodate its sickness. So we’ll argue about who has more rights or why someone is being thrown in the hole but the real issue is: How could a great nation ever create such a despotic, authoratarian and insane system? (And it is insane. It doesn’t create better citizens, lower recidivism, protect public safety or rehabilitate. And yet we perpetuate this totally broken system as being just fine the way it is. The very definition of insanity.)
Which brings me back to the word justice.
I’ve found that, to prosecutors, justice means something very different than it does to me. Recently, a prosecutor defined justice as “having enough evidence to obtain a conviction.” I was shocked. I thought a prosecutor’s job was to convict the guilty and protect the innocent . Which, in my definition meant determing that a defendant was actually the perpetrator, not that, whether innocent or guilty, the state simply had enough evidence to lock ‘em up.
But that’s not justice to a prosecutor. And, this prosecutor, whose office had convicted several of our young LWOPs, also, by his actions, defined justice as:
Locking children up for life, whether they killed anybody or not.
Throwing kids awaiting trial into county jails with adults.
Throwing kids, after conviction, into the adult prison system rather than sending them to a juvenile facility until they reach majority.
Direct filing kids into the adult system without any checks and balances.
(Latest report shows direct file doesn’t work. http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/220595.pdf.
Not that facts matter — at least when they run counter to the wishes of the powerful.)
So, on a Sunday morning, we’re back to words and what they mean to each of us.
Let me throw out a few final words that I regularly hear from our young prisoners:
“despair”
“hopelessness”
“anger”
“frustration”
“sadness”
“regrets”
“worthlessness”
“loneliness”
“forgotten”
Now how would YOU interpret their meaning?