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THE US GULAG PRISON SYSTEM - THE SHAME OF THE NATION AND CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

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Most civilized countries have no death penalty, and in the Global North only the US and Japan still do. Japan is very selective in who it executes, unlike the US with its assembly line-like killing operations. The Japanese have executed about 50 inmates in the last dozen years and about an equal number now await execution. Many opponents of the death penalty call these "final solution" acts institutionalized, state-sponsored, ritualistic acts of torture-murder. They say "torture" because often the prisoner is so hated that their executioners "deliberately" try to inflict pain during the process of killing them. And while that alone is inhumane and barbaric enough, all too often the accused is innocent, often the state knows it, and they're still put to death. Most often these are people of color, most likely black, poor and unable to afford a proper defense. They become victims of a system not based on justice but on vengeance along with the belief by elected officials that being "tough on crime" is a good vote getter.

The case of Stan "Tookie" Williams, as much as anyone, stands out for its barbarity and gross injustice. Stan was a co-founder of the Crips street gang as a teenager in South Central Los Angeles in 1969. He was convicted and sentenced to death for multiple murders he said he never committed (I believe him), but never got a proper defense to prove it. Even later when evidence became known that might have exonerated him, he was never given a chance to prove his innocence.

Over a dozen years before his execution in California, Stan changed his life, became an anti-gang activist while on death row, and renounced his former gang affiliation. He co-wrote children's books, worked to convince youths not to join gangs and wrote one of the most compelling books on prison life I ever read called Life in Prison. He did it to show readers what prison life is really like in plain, stark language. He pulled no punches. Anyone reading it will know that prison is no place any human being wants to be.

For his work in prison, Stan received multiple Nobel Peace Prize nominations, in 2004 a feature film called Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story was made about his life, and as his execution date approached, a mass effort I was part of was launched to urge an uncaring and hostile Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency. Fat chance. Thousands joined the effort including celebrities, politicians, Nobel laureates and Pacifica Radio, especially on its very special bold and courageous KPFA weekday news and information program Flashpoints Radio (the best program of its kind anywhere). It was all in vein, clemency was denied and Stan was put to death by lethal injection on December 13, 2005 as thousands protested outside the infamous San Quentin State Prison. Stan's death was not easy or painless. It took repeated needle insertions in a process that took nearly 30 minutes of great inflicted pain to complete. Stan's suffering at the end was not an exception. It's common practice, and as mentioned above, is deliberately inflicted by a sadistic staff. As such, even for a prisoner being executed, this is a flagrant violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." But who cares and who will act to prevent it when it's inflicted on a condemned black man and on the day the state murders him.

THE PROFITABLE BUSINESS OF RUNNING A GULAG

The for-profit side of running a gulag began to explode during the Reagan years when incarceration rates began increasing dramatically. Along with a growing private prisons industry (a small slice of the prison pie still largely a public enterprise), a vast array of private businesses wanted a piece of the action and got it. These include architectural and construction companies; food service contractors; all sorts of equipment, hardware and other suppliers of steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, and health care and medical supplies. There's also a big need for uniforms and assorted weapons including dangerous products to restrain like clemical sprays that can injure, cause severe pain, second degree burns, temporary blindness or worse and taser electro-shock guns that emit 50,000 volts of electricity (enough to flatten an all-pro NFL lineman in peak form) that can and have killed as many as 167 victims from it's use through January, 2006. And there's loads more. The (mal) care and feeding of a couple of million humans takes a lot of supplying to keep the system going. Add it all up and it's big business, and it gets bigger with every new prison and the inmates to fill them. Not to worry. Unlike oil, there's no chance of running out bodies.

The big players in this growing industry are the private companies that run the hellholes. And the ones they run are even more hellish than the public ones. Private, publicly owned corporations with shareholders and Wall Street to please always need a growing revenue and profit stream and strict cost control to maximize the bottom line part of it. That means understaffing, low pay for poorly trained staff, poor and unsafe conditions, little or no life-enhancing or self-help programs like educational opportunities or counseling services to rehabilitate those in need like ilicit drug users, and even worse medical care than the third world kind in the publicly run system. Why bother, they all cost money, reduce profits and constrain shareholder equity. Private contractors can also exploit prisoners as de facto chattel. They're not obliged to pay wages or benefits and can take full advantage of all those bodies free of charge. Why would they ever pass that up. It's one more revenue and profit stream.

The private side of running prisons is still a small part of the total. But it's growing, and as it does, it's darker side may just get darker. Unlike most businesses, quality control is not one of their concerns. If humans suffer to enhance the bottom line, who will care. In running a gulag, you just gotta keep 'em under control locked in cages, and if you use, abuse and lose some along the way, there's plenty more supply to fill the available beds. That's how it works in a nation that commodifies its masses and exploits them. It's what happens in this modern era when social conditions deteriorate enough to produce what Franklin Roosevelt spoke about in the Great Depression years of the 1930s when he said "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." It's not that bad yet, but we're heading in that direction. As discussed above, it produces a restive population the state chooses to lock up in lieu of providing vital social services to satisfy essential needs. The result is the US gulag, the shame of the nation. Future historians and others will judge us by the character of our social conscience, especially how we treat our least advantaged and most needy. They'll also judge us by our system of justice and the prisons within it which reflect that conscience. The honest ones won't be kind. The great Russian 19th century novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, once remarked that he measured the quality of a society by the quality of its prisons. He might have added by its quantity as well.

THE EVIDENCE SHOWS A NATION MOVING FROM A REPUBLIC TO TYRANNY

The evidence on our criminal injustice system and prisons within it alone shows a nation moving from a republic to tyranny. It's not much different from what happened in ancient Rome when it passed from a republic to an empire under the rule of its emperor Augustus Caesar after Julius ignored his "Ides of March" warning and ended his reign the hard way in the Roman Senate.

Our prison system alone is a stark symbol and reminder of a society based on militarism and imperial conquest abroad, the shredding of our civil liberties at home, and the dismantling of our social contract obligation along with the transfer of wealth to the privileged and powerful. It reflects a nation descending into the hell of tyranny and despotism that threatens to become worse and affect us all except those at the top. We've created the monster of a national security police state (run by the new Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence) to control a growing restive population that will likely grow larger. It will include many more of us as those in need grow in numbers and new demons are easily found, targeted and moved to prison cells to maintain absolute control. That's how it works in all tyrannical states, even ones claiming to be democracies like ours but which, in fact, are not.

It happened in ancient Rome and in more modern times in Nazi Germany after Hitler was appointed Chancellor and ended the Weimar Republic. He called his party the National Socialist German Workers Party (the term Nazi is the short form for National Socialist with a "zi" on the end), but his constituents were the German industrialists and militarists and his ideology was fascist and racist. It wasn't long before he removed his many enemies and tried to create a state for the privileged and Aryian pure. The immortal words of Pastor Martin Niemoller explained it and warns us now when he said they first came for the Jews, then the Communists, then the trade unionists and each time he didn't speak out because he wasn't one of them - until there was no one left and they came for him, and there was no one to speak out to help him.

This essay only addresses the mass incarceration of the most vulnerable among us. I've discussed the other issues in other writings and intend to write solely about our war on immigrants in a future article. But unless we heed Pastor Niemoller's warning, one day, sooner than we think, they'll come for us and who'll be left to help. Based on the evidence I've presented we already have a society out of control with a reckless rogue administration, a "go-along" Congress and "friendly" courts leading us along the road to hell.

The US prison system is its metaphor and clear warning and reflects a repressive state based on harsh and unjust Patriot Act laws that are close to being supplemented by a racist, fascist-style immigration bill passed by the House (the so-called Sensenbrenner anti-immigration bill) and now being considered in the Senate. Its provisions that criminalize undocumented immigrants (targeted at those of color) and all those compassionate enough who help them are right out of the bowels of Nazi hell. It may pass and likely be followed by even more repressive laws that target you and me unless we're one of the privileged. So far, the targets are mostly those on the bottom rungs of society - people of color including immigrants and Muslims. But also in the line of fire is anyone of influence (including Muslim academics falsely labeled terrorists) daring to speak out and oppose state policy. How long will it be before it gets even worse and no one is safe?

Few people know the president has now given himself the sole power to designate anyone he chooses for any reason he decides a "bad guy" - incredibly in that language. Going even further, in January, 2006, George Bush claimed the right to govern as a "Unitary Executive" with the power to abrogate the separation of powers doctrine, bypass the Congress and courts and act as he chooses to "protect national security." This simply means if he decides to ignore the law he'll govern by presidential edict usurping the right of dictatorial power with no constraint. If he's ever brazen enough to do it (and don't believe he won't be) and isn't stopped, he'll have "crossed the Rubicon" and turned the country into a full-blown totalitarian state and the ball game is over for all of us. We're already all in the queue as potential prey, and we'd better understand we're moving up in it fast. Unless Bush-Cheney and those around them are stopped, they'll come for us one day, and then it'll be too late. It makes a shameless mockery of any notion that all citizens, rich and poor, are entitled to the sacred rights and protections guaranteed us by the Constitution. Only the privileged and powerful get that right today, not the rest of us. And if you're black and poor, an undocumented immigrant or a Muslim of color (our latest public enemy No. 1), you have no rights at all. Step right up, they've assigned you a number too, and you'd better keep a bag packed.

We've come a long way in our 230 year history but, except for brief periods of relief and redress, it's been pretty much downhill. If that's "the American way", it's time we retool and find a new path to follow, one based on social, political and economic justice, of caring about all others instead of using and abusing them for the benefit of a privileged few. We may not have much time left, so we better wake up and move fast. If we keep watching Fox News, read the New York Times, listen to NPR and then run to the mall, we're doomed to meet the same fate as all other nations who followed the road we now travel. It's the road to hell, and ours isn't even paved with good intentions.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog address at sjlendman.blog.spot.com.

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