Sometimes I think the whole world is one big prison yard

Some of us are criminals

The other of us are guards

bob dylan

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer had an interesting life. They say he wrote Crime and Punishment in seven days. The 19^th century Russian mob was evidently a little frustrated with him over some gambling debts, and he had to work fast. Earlier in his life he had run into problems with the real Russian mob headed by the Tsar. 

It seems that the Russian intelligentsia was into penny newspapers in the middle of the 19^th century, much like many Americans.  Young Fyodor was not that happy with the forces that be and was involved in distributing these flyers in an attempt to organize a new wave, so to speak.

Well the Tsar and his minions did not like this 'new wave' and Fyodor found himself in the midst of a round-up.  As he stood on the gallows waiting for the trap to open sending him to his death with a rope around his neck, he and his compadres were given a pardon.

Needless to say this stuck in Dostoevsky's mind for  the rest of his life and he includes the incident in another of his great books: The Idiot.  The main character in that novel was granted executive clemency at the last minute in a similar manner as the writer.

Yesterday, one of my favorite Senators, Jim Webb wrote:

America's criminal justice system is broken.

How broken? The numbers are stark:

• The United States has 5% of the world's population, yet possesses 25% of the world's prison population;

• More than 2.38 million Americans are now in prison, and another 5 million remain on probation or parole. That amounts to 1 in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release;

• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980, up from 41,000 to 500,000 in 2008; and

• 60% of offenders are arrested for non-violent offensives--many driven by mental illness or drug addiction.

Numbers only tell part of the story.

I hit this issue once every week or so, in my most inimitable fashion, but here is a man who has real power and knows how to write a hell of a lot better than a dufus in his pajamas. He takes four sentences to sum up my main argument that this issue must be addressed. And it must be addressed now.

When I was a college kid I was blown away by two instances of totalitarianism.

The first instance of course involved Nazi Germany and the internment camps. Six million Jews and six million other human beings (consisting of Catholics, Gypsies, mentally ill, mentally retarded....) were exterminated.

The second instance involved Stalinist Russia which had its own dalliance in extermination but which also incarcerated some ten million people in the Gulags. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote much about this horrible prison system including his The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The numbers just astounded me along with the living conditions of these Soviet prisoners. The death rate was astounding.

But times have changed.  And now we, the richest country in the world and supposedly the freest, have the largest prison population. To reach 25% of the numbers reached by Soviet Russian sickens me.

Oh, but these are American Prisons, not gulags.  Well that is a subject of another blog, but I just would like to underline that two and a half million people are not sitting around and playing tennis and watching cable tv.

And as I like to point out we have more prisoners than Red China (remember that term before Murdoch and the other fascist corporate pigs started making money over there?). Now it turns out that China has a federal type system that roughly approximates our federal, state and local governments. So figures vary a little. But suffice it to say that China has an equivalent number of prisoners BUT THEY HAVE FOUR TIMES OUR POPULATION. AND CHINA IS A TOTALITARIAN STATE.

How did we end up in this situation?  Well there are many reasons.

First, as the Senator points out, the incarceration of felons involved in non-violent drug crimes escalated from 40,000 to 500,000 thousand since the War On Drugs program was initiated. So according to Webb's figures a little over 20% of our prison population are their because of drug usage and some dealing. No one I ever knew who had a drug habit, did not also deal a little in order to keep in stock as they say. So this is not the entire reason behind our huge incarceration rate but it is a substantial contributing cause.

When the cable channels run out of reality show reruns along with the reruns of their dramas and sitcoms they air those reality cop shows. It always slays me when the date on the video say 9/18/1998 but who cares?  I saw one last night where the police stop four boys for some traffic infraction, frisk everyone of them, note an odor of maryjane emanating from the automobile and begin the search of the car.

Oh, well heres a large catch of marijuana exclaims the officer.  It's a baggie half full of weed. All the while the background is a Jamaican jingo playing; Bad Boys.

I feel safer, don't you?

Webb adds:

While heavily focused on non-violent offenders, law enforcement has been distracted from pursuing the approximately one million gang members and drug cartels besieging our cities, often engaging in unprecedented levels of violence. Gangs in some areas commit 80% of the crimes and are heavily involved in drug distribution and other violent activities. This disturbing trend affects every community in the United States.

In a previous blog I noted that something around 10,000 deaths by gun fire can be attributed to gang activity. Gangs and gang violence should be examined in another post, but if there are a million men involved in violent gangs in this country, how many innocent people live in fear every single day in this country?

Senator Webb goes on to discuss the violence and misery of our prisoners, the immense problems facing those who are released and a program he is working on with Senator Leahy to look into this mess.

The goal of this legislation is nothing less than a complete restructuring of the criminal justice system in the United States. Only an outside commission, properly structured and charged, can bring us complete findings necessary to do so.

Fixing our system will require us to reexamine who goes to prison, for how long and how we address the long-term consequences of their incarceration. Our failure to address these problems cuts against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-jim-webb/why-we-must-reform-our-cr_b_214130.html

I started this post with a discussion of Fyodor for a reason.

I find it fascinating that every Thanksgiving our Commander  in Chief pardons a turkey.

I also find it fascinating that in a land where we incarcerate 2.5 million people at any one time, a couple hundred pardons might be issued--usually granted to a few members of the upper crust of society.

Carter presented an older version of the 'pardon' and its use by the ruler of a country. He actually 'pardoned' tens of thousands of citizens in on felled swoop. Oh we can get into the niceties of pardon, commutation of sentences and amnesty or even look into probation.

But Jimmy Carter's amnesty just said:  Look the Vietnam War is over. Let us really put it behind us. Let us begin anew.  Everyone in prison at the time for draft related offenses and everyone involved in draft related offenses were freed from prison and freed from further prosecution.

Back in 1969 I was in college and having filled out the proper draft form, I was exempt from military service.  My draft number that year was 9.  In 1970 my draft number was 309.  I was sick and tired of being in the running so to speak. So in 1970, even though I was a member of the Honors Society, I just declined to fill in the form requesting the exemption. That activated my number. However, later that year I was working in the college library and picked up a paper and discovered that the Selective Service System had reached 270 AND IT WAS ONLY SEPTEMBER. HA!!!  A week later Nixon let me off the hook by stopping at that number for the year. Phew as they say.

But I guess the real story was that in 1969 me and my buddies were sitting in my basement. We were all drunker than skunks and I got into an argument over the draft with someone who never even served in the armed forces.  I pulled out my draft card. Now there was the draft card and attached to it was some receipt thingy. So thinking I was clever, I pulled off the receipt and burned it right there and then.

Of course I woke up in the morning with a tremendous hangover and discovered to my dismay that I had indeed burned my draft card. Hahahahahahahha That was a federal offense.

I was never prosecuted. I mean, who would know?

Kids like me were hiding in Canada or living 'underground'. I even knew one guy who just presented himself to the authorities and served six months along with thousands upon thousands of others.

President Carter did not just pull this idea out of his ass. There is a long history in Europe of tyrannical rulers granting thousands of pardons on certain feast days and such. They did it for several reasons. One was that the Church liked the idea. Another reason was that THEY NEEDED TO CLEAN OUT THEIR PRISONS FROM TIME TO TIME.

Another great example of the pardon, more specifically the reprieve occurred in Illinois:

All prisoners in the US state of Illinois awaiting execution have had their death sentences commuted in 2003:

Governor George Ryan, a Republican who leaves office on Monday, told 156 inmates on death row that they no longer face dying by lethal injection. The unprecedented move, the most radical since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976, is likely to spark a furious debate across the US.

"I'm going to sleep well tonight knowing that I made the right decision," said Governor Ryan.

"Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," he said.

On Friday, Governor Ryan pardoned four death row inmates convicted of murder, all of whom said that confessions were beaten out of them by police in Chicago.

Leroy Orange, one of the men pardoned, was at Northwestern University Law School to hear Governor Ryan announce the blanket commutation of death sentences in the state.

Mr Orange, who had spent 19 years in prison after being convicted of fatal stabbings, spoke of his relief at being released.

"A lot of pressure was lifted from me that I didn't realise was on me." http://www.ccadp.org/news-ryan2003.htm

I would really like to see a real, concrete use of the pardon as a tool to clean out our prisons. Why not figure out a way to release at least a quarter of our prisoners?