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August 20, 2004
Time to Pay Attention
This is going back a few weeks, but I really get a lot out of Bill Maher's show every week. His new rules are usually right on the money, notably the last one he does, and the 8/6/04 episode was no exception.
Considering what I've learned about the prison system lately, this "New Rule" particularly struck close to home:
You can make fun of Lynndie England all you want, but when it comes to prisons, we are all holding the leash. Now this week, America's anti-Sweetheart, Private Lynndie England, faced justice for her part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, "The Sleepover." Now, a lot of people think Abu Ghraib happened because, as Americans, we're comfortable asking our horny hillbillies to fight our wars. And we are. But we're also comfortable with pretending that anyone in America who winds up in prison for whatever reason somehow deserves not just loss of freedom but a brutalizing, terrifying trip to hell.It's no coincidence that the guard described as the ringleader in Iraq, Charles Graner, worked before the war - where? - in a prison in America. He didn't learn to torture from the CIA or Special Ops. He picked it up right here and took his skills of abuse to Iraq. Outsourcing at its worst!
Now, we are all Lynndie England because we know what's happening in our prisons and we don't care. We tell ourselves - we tell ourselves the convenient lie that anyone who bears the label "criminal" or "terrorist" is irredeemable, sub-human, psycho scum, and so whatever happens to them behind bars is justified. When the truth is, millions of non-violent Americans have been traumatized for life in prisons simply because they either did drugs or made a bad judgment, usually when they were young, stupid and drunk. You'd think President Bush could relate.
There are over two million Americans behind bars, and that is not including the people who work at Wal-Mart. America, the nation that always has to be number one, is number one in percentage of its citizens in jail. Two million people. The equivalent of locking up all of Miami, which is not a bad idea until at least the election is over.
It costs $40 billion to house this many prisoners. Do you know how many countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 we could attack for that kind of money?
So, in conclusion, if your response to this is "not my problem," remember this: there are monsters and animals in our prisons, yes. But most didn't go in that way. But that's how they'll come out. Or to put it another way, if you think Martha Stewart has an attitude now...
It's time we stopped being a prison state and start actually reforming some of these people; and it's time the rest of us stopped turning a blind eye. Because, otherwise, until you've been directly affected by the prison system, you will have no idea what injustice the Justice System contains.
See the entire text at HBO: Bill Maher's New Rules
Posted by Bastique at August 20, 2004 11:33 AM