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The Criminality of Justice in the U.S.A By Donovan, Prisoner of War in AmericaWhen I was held pre-trial in the county-jail, a Catholic priest was arrested for molesting two young brothers at a religiously sponsored day camp. The reason the priest was finally caught, after years of forcing himself on young children, was that one of the brothers suffered a torn rectum and was bleeding uncontrollably. The whole sordid story gushed out. The priest had forced sex upon dozens of children. I was facing and ultimately received 30 years for a conspiracy involving about 34 kilos of cocaine, my first and only arrest. A torn rectum would not implicate me, however. It would be the testimony of those who would trade testimony against me for their freedom. The priest was sentenced to one year in the county jail. While the rest of us were caged like zoo animals, never seeing the light of day, the priest became a trustee and took outside trips to libraries and book-shops to collect donated books. While on these trips he often ate in restaurants, enjoyed air conditioning and the usual comforts of normal living. He worked in the library and delivered books to various cell pods within the jail. He was very pious and remorseful-to outward appearances-and was released long before my case went to trial. I've been down about eight years, as long as Lawrence Singleton and eight times longer than the child loving priest. I have seventeen to go. Singleton raped a young girl in California and chopped her arms off above the wrists for good measure. He dumped her in the wilderness but, because he had used a dull ax, she somehow survived. He was released because California prisons are, like everywhere else, jammed with non-violent drug law violators. It was deemed more appropriate-to release Singleton to keep a two bit drug offender in his stead. Lawrence Singleton subsequently butchered a Florida woman with a steak knife and is awaiting trial for her murder. In New York a teenage girl received a 20 year sentence for brokering a two ounce sale of cocaine and in Oklahoma, Will Foster, a husband and father was sentenced to 93 years for growing marijuana in an old bomb shelter. It did not matter that he is an arthritic who used marijuana to relieve his symptoms. Meanwhile, all across the U.S. rapists and repeat child molesters get slapped on the wrist and then released early, and a white collar thief who rips off $300 million from the investors pays back half and does a year in a camp. The ironic thing is that while serious crime is showing a decline, the inmate population continues to explode. Why? Because non-violent drug offenders are in endless supply for the reason that drug prohibition just does not work. Nevertheless, the policy setters in this country have things so skewed that the non-violent drug offender, whose numbers have increased 35% from 1990 to 1995, does more time behind bars per capita than all other offenders. California has the largest number of prisoners and in the last 20 years has, in a paroxysm of brainlessness, built 21 new prisons which cost up to $225 million each. During this time California has only built one new university, this in a state which one time had the world's best public university system. Ladies and gentlemen of the American public, when are you going to wake up? Drug prohibition is a failure, you cannot lock away all drug law dissenters, you put them away for too much time as it is and it will break you in the end. Along the way you release sexual predators and violent criminals like Singleton and destroy drug law violators and their families by the millions. It is time for a new policy-now! |
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