In Our Own Back Yard

Finally New York is easing the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws that created the mandatory sentencing craze that made prisons into a growth industry, especially in rural areas, and brought the trend in private prisons into vogue. Yet another way to make money. The United States has the highest incarceration rates in the world: by 2007 there were 2.29 million people in county jails, prisons, and federal penitentiaries. We do better than Russia, Rwanda, and China. Think about that.

An outsider might look and consider the US involved in a massive race or class war since the breakdown of who is in prison is equally as shameful. In 2002, 93.2% of prisoners were male. About 10.4% of all black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29 were sentenced and in prison, compared to 2.4% of Hispanic males and 1.3% of white males. With 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prison population. (Walmsley, Roy (2005). "World Prison Population List" (PDF).)

And how we treat people in prison deserves our attention, too, because as I've said many times before, it isn't just Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It's here. It's called solitary confinement.

The March 30, 2009 issue of The New Yorker features an article by Dr. Atul Gawande. It's available on-line and it should be mandatory reading.

Humans are social beings. We need other people. Contact, interaction, not just instant or text messaging either, but real intimacy is a requirement of our genes. Therefore, to put people into solitary confinement in prisons for prolonged periods of time creates destroyed and desperate human beings at the end of their ordeal. "One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction." So use of solitary confinement as punishment for rule violation and violence itself, just breeds a less controllable and diminished human being.

It's a form of torture: hallucinations, depression, uncontrollable violence, paranoia, and "resistance is the sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity."

With the rise of the supermax prison, so, too there has been a rise in the use of solitary confinement. "America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units."

Having worked as a Human Rights Commissioner in Marin County, where the infamous San Quentin Prison is located, I believe no sane person can remain sane in that atmosphere for long: that includes the inmates and the correctional officers. The noise, the smells, the unpredictability will drive you mad.

Since it costs too much to maintain these prisons, now is the time for us to demand that they be emptied and that these barbaric practices be ended. Yes, right here in America.