The Prison State

The Prison State

Lock 'Em Up

http://counterpunch.org/yates08172010.html

By MICHAEL YATES
August 17, 2010

Sometimes events conspire to make you think that things are worse
than you imagined. On August 3, Marilyn Buck died. Marilyn was a
fighter in the struggle for racial justice and against the most
virulent pestilence in the world­United States imperialism. Unlike
most of us, she put her money where her mouth was and her life on the
line. It is easy now to forget that the agents of repression­the
police, the FBI, the courts, the government itself­consciously and
actively targeted those who were active in and led the civil rights
and Vietnam war resistance movements. They infiltrated and acted as
provocateurs in movement organizations; they arrested innocent
people; they enacted and enforced draconian laws; they illegally
tapped phones and spied on any and all persons suspected of
"subversive" activity; and they tortured and murdered those who they
deemed to be the most dangerous radicals.

Whites like Marilyn who militantly supported black liberation were
high on the list of suspects. She was arrested in 1973 for buying
(legal) arms under a false name. She was sentenced to ten years in
prison, and during a furlough to consult with her lawyers in 1977,
she went underground. She was arrested again in 1983, accused of
multiple crimes­aiding the prison break of Asata Shakur, planning and
participating in several bombings of public facilities, and taking
part in the infamous Brinks robbery of 1981 in which a guard and two
policemen were killed. She was convicted and sentenced to eighty
years in prison.

While incarcerated, Marilyn earned college degrees, became a poet and
writer of distinction, mentored many prisoners, fought for the rights
of those behind bars, and continued as an activist in the battles
that defined her before her imprisonment. Finally scheduled for
parole, she discovered that she had cancer. Treatment failed and she
died at home, having been released a few weeks early because of her
failing health. She was sixty-two years old.

This bare bones sketch hardly does justice to her life or what she
endured in prison. In an interview published in Monthly Review in
2001, here is how answer to a question about how prison time had
affected her personally:

Imagine yourself in a relationship with an abuser who controls your
every move, keeps you locked in the house. There's the ever-present
threat of violence or further repression if you don't toe the line. I
think that's a fairly good analogy of what happens. And imagine being
there for fifteen years.

To be punished, to be absolutely controlled, whether it's about
buttoning your shirt; how you have a scarf on your head; how long or
how baggy your pants are­all of those things are under scrutiny. It's
hard to give a clinical picture of what they do, because how do you
know, when you're the target, or the victim, what that does to you?
But theres a difference between being a target and being a victim.

Like most prisoners, she was not allowed to attend her mother's
funeral. From the same interview:

My mother died about six weeks ago. She became ill in September, so
I went through a phase of real guilt that I wasn't there. And real
sorrow and real anger. I think I've looked at the guilt a little
more. I just couldn't be there. But the sorrow of not being able to
hold my mother's little bird hand by the time she was starving to
death from the cancer … just breaks my heart. And there's nothing I
can do about it.

I could intellectualize it. I could have been on a ship halfway
around the world, and we got stuck in the trade winds and couldn't
get there in time. But I'm an extreme realist and understand who I am
as a political prisoner. I knew that I would not be allowed to go to
her bedside, nor to her funeral. That was just the reality. She died
on a Sunday. And she was buried on my birthday. So it's just all very hard.

I talked to my mother every week I could. And she came to visit me
once a year. It was hard for her to get here. My mom was seventy-four
She had to drive a long way and go through all the emotional turmoil
that you can't avoid when you see somebody you can't do anything for.
So I had to look at her anger, too.

In a certain way, I want to be able to lie on the floor and bang my
heels and cry and scream, but that just hurts my heels…So what can I
say? I'm having a hard time. I'm having a very, very hard time. I…you
know, it's grief. But it's grief under dire conditions. I'll always
miss my mother.

A few days after Marilyn Buck's death, I received the current print
edition of the CounterPunch newsletter. In it there is an astonishing
article by journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. The title is "Defending the
700,000 Most Despised People in America," and it describes efforts by
the mothers of accused and prosecuted sex offenders to get our
draconian sex offender laws changed.

JoAnn interviews several mothers, and their stories of what has been
done to their sons are heartrending. A typical scenario unfolds like
this. Local cops troll internet chat rooms posing as young girls and
boys. An adult, usually a young man, says he is looking for female
friendship. The cop then does everything possible to seduce the man
into coming to his or her house, presumably for sex. If the young man
resists, the decoy uses explicitly sexual language to entice him. If
he succumbs and goes to the house, vice cops are waiting. What
follows then is a nightmare of arrest, sensationalist stories in
local­and sometimes national­ media (fed to them by ambitious
district attorneys), expensive and often corrupt lawyers, extreme
family and financial stress, a plea bargain, probation and counseling
(paid for by the young man or his family), community service, a
lifetime as a registered sex offender, and the most invasive and
incredible set of rules and regulations, which must be obeyed to the
letter under threat of more or less permanent probation or prison.
These include regular breathalizer, urine, and lie detector tests,
for which the "offender" must pay. All for an absolutely victimless
"crime." After a mother tells Wypijewski that her son must have a
"safety plan," approved by the probation officer before going
anywhere, there is this exchange:

JW: So, say, I will be brought to the appointment by an adult in a
car and if a child comes in I'll run down to the parking lot and sit
in the car until the kid is gone?

D: That kind of thing.

S: You have no idea how inhumane. Tell her about that test, D.;
what's it called ­ plasmo-something?

JW: Plesmograph?

D: You go into a room with an examiner. They hook your penis up to a
monitor. They show you pictures of women in different states of
dress, and they monitor the flow of blood in your penis. My son's
test came back as "inconclusive." It didn't show that he had any
sexual deviance, but it didn't show that he didn't either. So the
recommendation was that he go to therapy to learn to manage his
sexual deviance, and to learn the patterns of his sexual deviance.

There are even court-imposed fines for the "victims" of the sex
offender, despite the fact that there were no victims.

I was interested to note that one of the states singled out in the
article as having especially harsh laws is Colorado, where we have
lived. Here decades of right-wing religious fervor and vicious radio
talk show jockeying have borne fruit for those hoping for a police
state before they die.

Not long after I read JoAnn's essay, we went to the huge Goodwill
store on West Burnside Street in Portland, Oregon to buy a few things
for cooking in our apartment. Portlanders love their many thrift
shops, and, like this one, they're always crowded. Karen was looking
for pans and saw a young man holding a small plate and looking on the
shelves next to her. She said to him, "There's a lot of stuff here."
He said that he was looking for a plate but could only afford one.
Karen suggested that he get something larger, since a large plate
could do what a small one could and more. She asked about a glass,
and he said that he had a plastic cup. Karen said that it would be
nicer to drink from a real glass. When it was evident that he had
little money, Karen gave him enough to cover the plate and a glass.
He thanked her and went to the checkout counter. A few minutes later,
we took our items to the same counter and found ourselves behind him.
He had a few items on the counter and a voucher for thirty dollars to
pay for them, plus the two dollars he got from Karen. He had
calculated closely and had just enough money. When the clerk couldn't
figure out whether to take the cash first or the voucher, we spent a
few minutes talking to the young man. He had just gotten out of
prison and was staying at a halfway house for ninety days. The $30
was the state's "start a new life fund." It didn't go very far. He
said that he was going to school to become a chef, and the state was
going to pay. We gave him $20, as much encouragement as we could, and
wished him luck. The clerk finally rang him up. He opened his
backpack and tried to get his new possessions into it. As he
rearranged his pack, we saw a package of cheese and some other food
items he had bought for his supper.

While were talking, a man joined the line behind me. He looked a
little more street-worn than our new friend. He had been listening in
on our conversation, and he asked me, "Did that guy say he just got
out of prison?" "Yes," I said. "What did he do? I've spent a lot of
time in prison. He doesn't look like someone whose been there." I
said that I hadn't asked him and that maybe you couldn't always tell
if someone had been in jail. He then began to complain about his
shoulder. He showed me a lump on his collarbone. It looked broken,
and I told him he should consider going to an emergency room, he said
that he owed hospitals too much money already. "At least, put your
arm in a sling," I said. He wrapped a shirt around his neck and arm
and said, "Yeah, that helps." He began to fumble with the items he
was buying , mostly clothes. Then he got out his $30 voucher. I
offered him some money, but he said he didn't need any. I stuffed
some bills in his gym bag and said, "Take this anyway."

7.3 million adults in the United States are incarcerated, on parole,
or on probation. A 2009 Pew Charitable trusts report fleshes out the
details of this horrifying number tells us that:

­One in 31 adults in America is in prison or jail, or on probation
or parole. Twenty-five years ago, the rate was 1 in 77.

­Overall, two-thirds of offenders are in the community, not behind
bars. 1 in 45 adults is on probation or parole and 1 in 100 is in
prison or jail. The proportion of offenders behind bars versus in the
community has changed very little over the past 25 years, despite the
addition of 1.1 million prison beds.

­Correctional control rates are highly concentrated by race and
geography: 1 in 11 black adults (9.2 percent) versus 1 in 27 Hispanic
adults (3.7 percent) and 1 in 45 white adults (2.2 percent); 1 in 18
men (5.5 percent) versus 1 in 89 women (1.1 percent). The rates can
be extremely high in certain neighborhoods. In one block-group of
Detroit's East Side, for example, 1 in 7 adult men (14.3 percent) is
under correctional control.

­Georgia, where 1 in 13 adults is behind bars or under community
supervision, leads the top five states that also include Idaho,
Texas, Massachusetts, Ohio and the District of Columbia.

Without a doubt, most of those enmeshed in the (in)justice system are
not dangers to society and would not have been in it at all in a
society that wasn't so racist and so shot through with every kind of
social and economic inequality. Unfortunately, whatever the reasons
why so many men and women have been denied their freedom, once the
numbers began to rise dramatically, constituencies came into
being­lawyers, police, probation officers, prison guards and staff,
drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselors, sex offender counselors,
vendors of all sorts, clerks and other clerical support staff, court
officers, judges, community service employers­that have a strong
stake in milking the new cash cow. Given that inequality will
continue to increase, that good jobs will be ever harder to find,
that towns and cities will be strapped for funds into the indefinite
future, that social unrest is likely to rise, that racism is not
abating, don't look for the criminal (in)justice system to shrink
anytime soon.
--

Michael D. Yates is Associate Editor of Monthly Review. His most
recent book is In and Out of the Working Class. He encourages
correspondence and can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com.

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