Certainly on of the most remarkable religious figures of our times is Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, better known to her devotees (and those who struggle with long Indian names) as Amma-ji. She is also known to many by her description as the hugging saint. Amma-ji's organization is known around the world for its humanitarian work in the fields of education, housing for the poor, agricultural service and just about every other area in which there are people are in need of kindness and help. One of the many projects undertaken by her organization is called Circle of Love Inside, which puts prisoners in touch with volunteers who are willing to correspond with them regularly.
Earlier this year I received a letter from a prisoner with whom I have been corresponding. He had not written for a while and apologized for the pause. The prison in which he is serving a life sentence was undergoing a lockdown, as a result of which all inmates were confined to their cells for a month without access to the exercise facilities or the commissary. Without access to the commissary, the prisoners had no access to any food except what is served to them in their cells. My friend said something in his letter that I was unable to forget:
I cannot imagine ever hating anyone so much that I would force him eat the food they serve us in prison.
He had described the food to me in earlier letters. It sounded both unappetizing and lacking in nutritional value. Most of the prisoners with whom my wife and I correspond have described the food as barely fit for animals. Add to that the fact that prisoners are routinely subjected to insults and often appallingly insensitive comments from guards and other inmates, and that guards often look the other way when inmates are being harassed and abused by other inmates, and the picture emerges of overcrowded prisons as environments that promote very little that conduces to positive transformation.
Statistics speak volumes about the effectiveness of this way of treating prisoners. According to the Department of Justice website, 65% of the criminals convicted of violent crimes in the United States are arrested on suspicion of committing violent crimes within three years of being released from prison. About 50% of those who serve sentences for violent crimes are sentenced to more time in prison for further violent crimes. American prisons do very little to reform behavior or build character; they do a great deal to punish, demean, belittle, shame and humiliate. The days of the penitentiary (a place to do penance) seem to be gone; the culture of the dungeon, which the European enlightenment tried to banish, has come back. Americans have forgotten Jeremy Bentham's dictum: “All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil.”
A good many people in American prisons have little education. Those who long to use their time behind bars to improve themselves through education are thwarted. Classes exist in many prisons, but there are often more people waiting to get into them than actually taking them. Some schools offer on-line education, but tuition is prohibitively high. Schools that offer lower tuition for in-state residents often do not regard state prisoners as legitimate residents of the state. As prisoners seeking educational opportunities face a long road of red tape and obstacles, their frustration mounts. Eventually, many simply give up. When their sentence ends, they are sent back into the world with no more education or skills than they had went they went in, and whatever social skills they may have once had have been eroded by years of abusive treatment. Few people on the outside are inclined to forgive a person who has served time in prison. America has increasingly devolved into a “one strike and you're out” society.
The American way these days seems to be to create problems through short-sightedness and stupidity—the war in Iraq comes to mind—and then to deal with those problems with reactive, fearful, angry, hateful and vindictive measures that make the situation dramatically worse. This pattern seems to prevail in almost everything American society as a whole does nowadays. It should come as no surprise that this pattern manifests itself in the prison system. Until this changes, we can only thank God (or whomever we wish to direct our thanks) for organizations like Amma-ji's, who make time to offer comfort to prisoners.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 04/20/2008 06:07:00 PM
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A Reuters news agency story dated February 10, 2009 reports that Federal judges have tentatively ordered the release of up to one-third the prison population is the state of California. If implemented, this could result in the release of as many as 57,000 prisoners. The immediate reason for the possible release is that California's prisons are dangerously overcrowded; moreover, the severe budget crisis that has emerged in the early months of this year has led to doubts as to whether the state can continue to pay the high cost of imprisoning approximately 170,000 inmates.
Part of the reason for the severe overcrowding in California's prisons is the policy of giving very long sentences%Gâ%@often life sentences%Gâ%@to repeat offenders. Although some prisons in California have educational and rehabilitational programs for inmates, the number of inmates seeking such programs far exceeds the numbers who can be accommodated. As a result many inmates receive little or no rehabilitative help while in prison. Once released, many prisoners lack the resources to become re-established with honest gainful employment on the outside. As a result California has the highest recidivism rate in the United States; according to a California government fact sheet, 70% of men and 40% of women return to prison after being released. When the state lacks the policy to ensure that all inmates have an opportunity for education or job training, it is almost inevitable to released prisoners will commit further crimes; when the state has a policy of giving very long sentences to repeat offenders, the prisons are sure to become overcrowded and expensive. The entire system is in serious need of reform.
While the situation is worst in California, the difference from other states are only a matter of degree. The United States as a whole leads the world in the percentage of its citizens who are in prison. I have written about this before. It is not only California but all the other states, and indeed the federal government, that must take a serious look at its policies in imprisoning those who have broken laws.
There is no doubt that the economic crisis the world is facing will have terrible consequences for many people—it is probably not exaggeration to say that nearly everyone alive will suffer at least some negative consequences. But not all the consequences of the economic disaster will be bad; some will lead, in odd and unexpected ways, to improvements in human society. Wasteful habits of producing and consuming goods and services are likely to be revised, perhaps helping to heal some of the deep wounds the human race has inflicted on the planet's ecological systems. Another unexpected consequence of the economic downturn could be a return to a more sane and humane set of policies of justice. The overcrowding of California's prisons, and those in most other states, is surely an injustice. The release of prisoners for whatever reason is a correction, even if an unintended correction, to that injustice. And for that we can all rejoice.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 02/21/2009 6:28 PM
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An American woman reacting to the release on compassionate grounds of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for playing a role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, said “He already got his compassionate release when he was sentenced to life imprisonment instead of getting the death penalty.”
The implication of the woman's comment—I should perhaps add that she made a point of saying that she was speaking as a Christian—was that being allowed to remain alive was as much compassion as the man deserved. The fact that he is believed to be dying of prostate cancer was not worth taking into consideration. Apparently also irrelevant to this woman is the fact that al-Megrahi was tried and convicted of murder in the United Kingdom, where capital punishment for the crime of murder was formally abolished in 1969 and abolished for all crimes in 1998. There was no possibility of al-Megrahi's being sentenced to die for any crime in the UK, so his being “allowed” to remain alive was not a question of compassionately releasing him from a punishment that under law he deserved. Rather, it was a question of applying the law of the land.
Megyn Kelly co-host of America's Newsroom on Fox News, may have been unaware of the law of the land in the United Kingdom when she said words to the effect that while the Scottish courts seem to favor compassion, Americans are more interested in the rule of law. In fact, the Scottish court demonstrated that it was quite interested in the rule of law, for the custom in Scotland has been to release terminally ill prisoners so that they can spend their last days with their families. It turns out that in the United Kingdom, the rule of law is not incompatible with compassion. The law itself has provision for the judicious exercise of compassion.
American law, of course, is not entirely devoid of compassion. In contrast to all other industrialized nations, however, there is more a culture of punishment than of rehabilitation. Not only is the duration of imprisonment in the United States longer than in Canada or Europe, but it has increased. It rose by 83% in the 1990s. That trend may be reversed as a result of fiscal difficulties in many states. Already there has been a serious cutback in California in allocations for programs to educate prisoners and teach them trades. These programs, which could reduce the likelihood of recidivism (now more than 70%), are proving too expensive to maintain in the short run. The long-term costs of cutting those programs, along with the pressure to release prisoners from severely overcrowded prisons without their having the benefit of being in facilities that could rehabilitate them, could be very high indeed.
Why are sentences in the United States so long? Why is the prevailing philosophy to throw people in prison and throw the key away? A web site dedicated to the so-called Three Strikes Law explains that the 1994 California law that mandates giving a minimum prison term of 25 years to a person convicted of a third felonious offense grew out of a conviction that some people are simply not responsive to being imprisoned. While it might seem strange to increase the time in prison of people do not benefit from imprisonment, the principal rationale for doing so was that society is made safer by keeping dangerous people in a place where they cannot commit more crimes. Experience has shown that such people often do continue to commit more crimes; it's just that their victims are other prisoners rather than people on the outside. The reasoning seems to be that people already in prison may somehow deserve to be victims of crime more than other people.
That people allow themselves to ask the question of who “deserves” to be a victim of violence or unpleasant treatment is alarming. Once the question is even asked, people can be drawn into thinking that it somehow makes sense to allow other sentient beings to suffer. Animals can be allowed to suffer, some might argue, because they are allegedly not intelligent, and besides they are useful for food and clothing. Poor people can be allowed to suffer, some might argue, because they do not work hard enough to get out of poverty. Jews and gypsies and homosexuals can be allowed to suffer, many Europeans did argue not so long ago, because they make no useful contributions to society. Immigrants can be allowed to suffer, many now argue, because they have not taken the right steps to become citizens, and even if they have, they may not understand our culture.
I do not understand our culture, especially that aspect of our culture that tolerates the suffering of prisoners, illegal immigrants, newly arrived legal immigrants, people living in countries against which we wage declared and undeclared wars. This aspect of American culture–human culture–is repugnant to me.
There is an alternative to the culture of punishment and allowing the suffering of those who allegedly deserve it. For the past several days I have been recalling a speech in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that my ninth-grade English teacher made the class memorize some fifty years ago. That teacher died about forty years ago, but I hope there are many of her former students who still remember at least the opening lines of the lines we were made to memorize. We need those words.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice.
In closing I express my heartfelt condolences to all those who lost loved ones on Pan Am flight 103. I also wish the best for the man convicted of their murder. May all the tormented souls connected with that tragic incident find peace of mind before they go the way of all flesh.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 08/21/2009 2:35 PM
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