Fixing the Problems of Our World
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9. Incarcerating creatures for crimes, real or imagined, and enslaving them as cheap labor and commodities, are dangerous, futile exercises in dominion. No group or category is ultimately controlled, yet the enforced custody imprisons everyone, innocent and guilty. What is needed is a new wave of abolition, one that strikes at the real heart of the corporate human enslavement of other sentient beings.
Although it is a leap to syllogize from slave ships to jails to meat factories, in truth they are working gears of one world-view. Prisoners are a kind of meat on ice, while a sentence of being turned into meat is an unexamined warrant imposed on animals. We may not initially see the parity between a convict on death row and a cow in a concentration camp, but jurisdiction is jurisdiction, prerogative is prerogative, murder is murder, and consumption of body and consumption of soul come down to the same cannibal act.
Legitimate stockades may have once protected tribes from their captive enemies and native renegades who meant harm, but the penitentiary system in the U.S. has evolved into a complex network of ruses to export blame and guilt, enforce class, punish unregulated use of hallucinogens and recreational drugs, house mental patients cheaply, and provide posturing points for politicians and cheap moralistic recreation for both the evangelical hoi polloi and the corporations behind 24-hour TV. Jail is legalized slavery, commoditization of souls to serve a rapidly growing PIC (Prison Industrial Complex) made up of bureaucrats, contractors, guard unions, and all their service rackets.
In short, jail as mere punishment (not as protection for society or rehabilitation) has spiraled out of control in America. It is not even a deterrent any more; it is an implement for the above-mentioned bureaucracies waging class warfare, pulling people out of their home communities and isolating them in cages to be abused and taunted. More than half the prisoners in the United States are social victims and scapegoats, not real violators of life or limb or even property. Young men are locked away for thirty years or more for selling marijuana or robbing a grocery store because their families were starving (Les Misérables to the thousandth). Mere traffic mistakes or spaceouts can lead to decades of hard time.
In China, meanwhile, prisoners are executed so their organs can be extracted and sold.
Here is the bottom line: there is absolutely no justice or reparation in capital punishment—maybe a temporary safeguard against repeat offenses of hardened criminals and sociopaths—but no grand redemption, no practical punishment. By the time most people are on death row, the actions that got them there have mellowed into something else. These dead men walking are sorry specimens, zombies with their spells broken. They often don’t even know what they did or remember why they did it. The firing squad is aiming at mere men not the hated crimes.
And the death penalty doesn’t deter; at the level of the shadow it abets the very things it punishes. By the simple physics of action/reaction, the ineradicable and scrupulous karma of each displaced deed activates the next. No energy can be retracted or revoked; all deeds must find its resolution in an outcome. To unleash institutional violence on a murderer neither avenges his act nor assuages the demon at its heart. Killing is thrill-killing, all. Liberate and transmute the energy inside the thrill, and people will find more useful things to do, more creative ways to transform violence or passion.
Our sentences invariably boomerang. As we feed cycles of fear and guilt, we implant crimes again on an unconscious or voodoo level. The acts of those executed by polities are given new power by the executions and take hold over the populace again, their impulse and thrill transferred subliminally to others. Only the façades of these malfeasances are behind bars—to be electrocuted, hanged, lethally injected. Yet even the corpse has renewed power; a dishonored body is turned into a dangerous ghost.
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