It's a long article but a good one and worth spending some time with.How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?
Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and "supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which, curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global warming.
"In the post-meditative experience become a child of illusion" is a slogan from the Tibetan mind training tradition. We engage the world as we experience it all the while realizing that reality is not as it seems to be.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Nation of prisoners
I want to direct your attention to an article called "Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?" and show you this excerpt:
Part of the problem -- and I think it's Dennis Kucinich who spoke about this recently -- is that our jails are filled with drug users and drug dealers. His idea is that there should be no "war" on drugs, that we should handle drug use and addiction as a health issue, giving needed treatment. This seems inspired to me, as the war on drugs has clearly failed, and those with dependence problems clearly need more help than a jail cell. I don't know how realistic it is, but the idea is worth investigation.
ReplyDeleteSupermax Confession is a recent blog post that deals with the themes of that article using poetry.
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