Download a digital copy (1.5 MB) - Open Door Community

Hospitality to the Imprisoned ˜ 147
One thing you will see if you look into the criminal-control system is absolute
continuity in our history since the Civil War. Our prisons are racist from
top to bottom. The criminal-control system is one of the major factors in the
fracturing of the African American family in this society. More than one-half of
all prison and jail admissions in this country are nonwhite. One in four African
American men aged twenty to twenty-nine are under the influence of the criminal-control
system—either in prison, jail, or on probation or parole. Half of all
African American men will be arrested at some point in their lifetimes.
The facts are there. Please look. The criminal-control system, including the
death penalty, is the main unfinished agenda of the civil rights movement. If you
look, you will see that prisons are now the major government program for the
poor in the United States. Prisons are our housing program for the poor. In the
Reagan-Bush era, thirty billion dollars was cut from housing budgets, while, of
course, the need has grown. Much of what remained was squandered and stolen
by high-level bureaucrats. In the same era, from 1980 to 1990, the prison population
in the United States doubled, while the overall crime rate increased only
7 percent.
We now spend sixteen billion dollars each year to lock up more than one
million Americans in prisons and jails; that’s like locking up the entire population
of San Francisco or Cleveland. The United States has the highest incarceration
rate in the world: 426 per 100,000. That is far more than South Africa’s 333
per 100,000, not to mention the Netherlands’ 40 per 100,000! In the 1980s our
rate surpassed the Soviet Union’s.
Prisons are our only remaining social program for the poor. Prisons are our
dumping ground. A reality that reflects what’s going on in the rest of the United
States is the Los Angeles County Jail, which houses 3,600 people who are seriously
mentally ill. In that jail are more mental patients than the total number in
California’s four state hospitals. As we have cut health and social services, jails
and prisons and, yes, death row have become our dumping ground for the mentally
ill and the retarded.
Lois, a woman I know who is the mother of a man on death row, says: “My
son, who is a chronic schizophrenic, was turned out of a mental hospital because
our health insurance ran out. They knew he wasn’t well but the money was gone
so his treatment was over. His condition got worse and he killed someone. Now
the state is spending four million dollars trying to kill him. There’s all this
money to kill him but there was none to help him. What kind of sense does that
make”
Prisons are taking everything. During a recent three-year period, the people
of Georgia spent $350 million for new prison construction while we cut programs
and fired state workers and couldn’t adequately fund our schools. George
Bush’s last budget slashed $100 million from public libraries and another $800