Explanation: I am not discussing a TV show. The subject today is the tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and juveniles who are doing life sentences in American prisons. In Pennsylvania, the largest juvenile lifer population in the world, exists. In the world.
As I wrote in my first book Live From Death Row, the fury and governmental rage fueling the unprecedented level of mass incarceration during the 80s would deplete state budgets and prove unproductive. Today, even conservative voices are echoing some of these concerns, driven, no doubt, by declining state budgets rather than humane concerns. During the ’80s, ambitious politicians launched a toxic rhetoric of more and more prisons, longer and longer sentences, and tougher, meaner prisons. Of course, such positions cost more and more tax dollars.
Many of these politicians are gone now, out of office or out of existence, and the bills are becoming due. And states can no longer foot the bill without drastically slashing other public services, like education. This long, bitter, and expensive path could have been avoided if only reason had prevailed over ambition, but it did not. That’s because the politicians of the ’80s used fear to push their punitive programs, something Americans are always susceptible to. Scholar activist Angela Y. Davis has long argued that political elites, deprived of the boogeyman of communism, focused on crime to establish new systems of state repression. Fear sells again.
Remember conservative scholars and critics foaming at the mouth about juvenile so-called “super predators?” It was sheer nonsense, but it opened the door to life sentences and death sentences for juveniles. The lesson: fear works, at least until the fever breaks. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
