Too Many Prisons (an excerpt from an article on the Gateless Gate Zen Ministry Website* http://www.gatelessgate.org*Not affiliated in anyway with this site of the same name
September 9, 2003
We have a problem. More than two million men, women and children are
imprisoned in the United States today. This amounts to 686 prisoners
for each 100,000 citizens. We have the largest prison population in the
world. Our cousins to the north in Canada have 100 and in England there
are 135 prisoners for each 100,000 of population. Worldwide, around
eight million people are in prison. This means that 25 percent of the
world’s prisoners are in the United States, the “land of the free.”
The problem is getting worse in part because we cannot build
prisons fast enough to hold the influx of men, women and children. The
federal government is building a fifth prison at its complex in
Coleman, Florida that will bring that total complex inmate population
close to 10,000. The State of Florida had an emergency expenditure in
August 2003 of $66 million to expand existing prisons due to an
unexpected increase in inmates.
The judiciary has been operating under guidelines that are
increasingly severe and rigid. Many recent laws mandate zero tolerance
standards, statutory minimum prison terms, and mandatory minimums for
time served.
The largest category of offenders in both state and federal
prisons are those convicted of drug crimes. Drug-related cases are
about 32 percent of the federal case load. In Florida they account for
about 28 percent of all sentences. These statistics are deceptive in
that they understate the extent of drug involvement, as a single
offender may have multiple charges of which drug offenses were not the
most severe violation. The most severe violation usually drives the
category.
How did we get into this predicament? The genesis of the
problem appears to be a schism that appeared in the national fabric at
the time of the war in Vietnam and eventually polarized the nation into
groups that opposed or supported the war. These groups became known as
the “law and order” and “counter-culture.” The end of the war did not
end their divergence. The conflict continued in the War on Drugs
initiated by the Nixon administration.
Let us clarify the term “drug.” Drugs are divided into two categories,
legal and illegal. Alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are legal drugs,
while illegal drugs include marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. The War on
Drugs focuses on illegal drugs.
The war on drugs has continued unabated from its initiation in
the1970s to today. However, there were two critical junctures. One was
the presidential election of 1988 and the other was a great compromise.
The campaign of 1988 marked the political dominance of “law and order”
over the counter-culture. It found expression in Willy Horton and the
election of George Bush. Michael Dukakis, Bush’s opponent and the
governor of Massachusetts, signed a routine weekend furlough for a
convict named Willy Horton, a convicted murderer, who raped a woman and
savagely beat her boyfriend while out on a prison release program. The
incident became the subject of an intense campaign of political
advertising. The lesson of that election was not lost on either
Democrats or Republicans.
To read the rest of this article and more extremely informative articles about the prison system
by K.C. Walpole, Senior Dharma Teacher
and to visit The Gateless Gate Zen Ministry Website http://http://www.gatelessgate.org/archive/kc/too_many_prisons/index.php
