By Mansfield Frazier
When Jimmy Dimora was sentenced to far, far too long in prison for what amounted to little more than a couple of blow jobs, a pizza oven for his backyard and some marble counter tops for his kitchen, the only major media outlet to raise a question was Channel 19. Bill Applegate asked viewers what they thought, but like the obedient little “good” Germans of the 1930s, the citizenry of Northeast Ohio was cowered into silence by a heavy-handed government. Virtually no one publicly responded to Applegate, but many folks in private will agree that, while Dimora certainly deserved to go to prison, his sentence was far too harsh.
“Casino Jack” Abramoff, the former high-powered Washington, DC lobbyist who misappropriated untold millions of dollars and once bragged of having a hundred members of Congress “in my pocket,” served a punk-assed three and a half years and is now out … charging $15,000 per speaking engagement, while Dimora is stepping off 28 years. And if a question is raised to the Department of Justice as to how sentences in the same United States can vary so widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the answer always is some legal mumbo-jumbo about “different aspects of different cases” … which is usually total bullshit, but just like the good little Germans we’re supposed to nod in agreement and pretend we believe it when they’re pissing on us, all the while telling us it’s only raining.
Currently the former superintendent of Atlanta’s public schools is facing up to 45 years in prison for allegedly orchestrating a cheating scandal. But even if the woman is guilty as charged and deserves to go to prison … but still, for 45 years? And this is in light of the fact government-mandated testing caused teachers across the country to fudge test scores in order to meet a standard many educators called unreasonable and unachievable. Interestingly, no parents have been indicted for their failures in regards to educating their children.
We need to always remain cognizant of the fact societies crumble from within, and just as truth is the first casualty of war, fairness is the first casualty of a rotting government. And there can be profound consequences.
The three innocent citizens recently gunned down in Texas — Kaufman County deputy prosecutor Mark Hasse on January 31, and Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, 65-year-old Cynthia McLelland, two months later — could perhaps be characterized as the latest casualties of another unfair government policy: the decades-long “war on drugs.”
This totally ineffective war, which has inflicted severe — and drug experts would argue, unnecessary — pain and suffering on untold millions of families (tearing many of them completely apart) since Richard Nixon declared it from the Oval Office 40 years ago, has done irreparable harm to the Republic. Not since Prohibition, which gave the nation its first taste of organized crime and brutal gangsters, has bad public policy created such unmitigated chaos.
The similarity between the Texas killings and those carried out south of the U.S. border by Mexican drug cartels are chilling, and is causing some to wonder if the havoc our national (seemingly unquenchable) appetite for substances lawmakers have declared illegal — which has destabilized the governments of other countries — has finally spilled over into our own nation. Indeed, some arm-chair pseudo-experts are positing that white supremacist members of the Aryan Brotherhood had nothing to do with these killings, preferring instead to blindly believe they were carried out by foreign nationals.
This reminds me of the immediate reaction of some folks who were seeking to assign blame after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Based on their own flawed belief system, they jumped to the conclusion the act was carried out by foreign terrorists, or worse, by members of the Nation of Islam, under the direction of Minister Louis Farrakhan — in spite of the fact no such acts of violence had ever been even alleged against this law-abiding sect by law enforcement. When it later turned out that Timothy McVeigh, a white supremacist, was responsible for the crime they remained curiously mute.
Which, in turn, calls to mind the quote by famed 20th century writer Anaïs Nin, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
This failure to deal with reality (based on long-held prejudices) — which, in addition to causing conservative candidate Mitt Romney to go down in flaming defeat in the last election cycle — can cause a kind of ultimately damaging form of tunnel vision. A willful blindness if you will — that could prove costly both in terms of bringing the perpetrators of these brutal murders to justice, and in moving to prevent such future heinous acts. False assumptions lead to false conclusions … which, in turn, lead to flawed, unworkable solutions.
To dismiss the fact Hasse was boldly killed in broad daylight on the same day the two top Aryan Brotherhood Texas leaders, Marshall “Dirty” Meldrum and Christian “Tuff” Dillon, pleaded guilty to racketeering in a Houston federal court as mere coincidence is wistful thinking at best, and foolhardy at worse. Especially in light of the fact both men allegedly had called for the inflicting of “mass casualties or murder” in retaliation from their jail cells.
After Hasse was executed McLelland said, “It’s such an anomaly … this doesn’t happen. The bad guys don’t hate prosecutors. They know we’re just doing our job just like they are.” Anyone who has ever served time in the last few decades knows how far off the mark his statement was … and his miscalculation perhaps played a part in his own death.
Indeed, for the first time in the history of our nation a federal prosecutor has removed himself from a case citing “security concerns.” While some in law enforcement will decry Jay Hilerman’s decision to step down as a prosecutor in a case being pursued against members of the Aryan Brotherhood as cowardice, others in the criminal justice system take another view. “I don’t think he would have stepped down if he felt he was defending the Constitution or the just rule of law,” said one local attorney, “but I don’t blame him for not wanting to put himself and his family in jeopardy simply to further this crazy war on drugs. To put one’s life on the line, or to die for this kind of insanity would be a total waste, a meaningless loss … and no one wants to just throw their life away simply because the government says it’s the right thing to do.”
Our Draconian drug laws have created a massive number of men and women behind bars (most of whom eventually return home) who absolutely hate law enforcement with a frightening vengeance. I recall the sick feeling that came over me as I stood in a TV dayroom in a Kentucky federal prison as men gathered around and cheered as news of the ever-increasing body count from Oklahoma City poured in. These men hated their government with a passion that hurt — and shamed — me to my core.
Anyone who still clings to the idea that men and women who are serving what they believe (with the support of good, solid evidence) are overly-harsh prison sentences — especially for drug-related crimes — are comfortable with their incarceration should quickly disabuse themselves of that notion. In fact, these prisoners are filled with rage, and now are beginning to return home.
Granted, there was a time in American criminal justice history where there was a strange kind of symbiosis between the good guys and the bad guys; even a grudging respect if you will. But all of that began to change with the building of the modern-day prison/industrial complex, which demanded an ever-increasing number of prisoners — serving inordinately long sentences — to satisfy the demands of shareholders of companies who profit from mass incarceration.
In his seminal 2010 work on our nation’s carceral system, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Robert Perkinson, a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii, wrote:
“ … corporations would collect payments from the state [Texas] to lock up inmates in their own private brigs. This is where the smart money was, as it involved both construction and renewable contracts, and by 1989 two of the smartest moneymakers in the emerging human confinement industry, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, had both opened two prisons in the state.”
The question could be legitimately raised that if the only “product” a corporation like CCA has to make money off of is the people it houses in its prisons nationwide, and its stock is traded on the open stock market, aren’t they trading in human beings? Of course there’s always been another word for this type of commerce: Slavery.
From the early 1900s on, our nation’s prison population grew right along with the growth of the general population, increasing approximately three-fold. But, with the advent of the war on drugs that increase shot up to 20-fold. Granted, there was an increase in violent crime after the turbulent ’60s which caused some of the increase in prison populations, but even after that increase began to ebb in the late ’80s the prison population continued to soar … simply because incarceration had been turned into a moneymaking business.
But the result has been that, while, prior to the turn of the last century a few thousand men and women returned home from prison annually across the nation, around 2003 that number began to increase to the point that now over 700,000 prisoners are released back into society each year, so it should not be at all surprising that some of them have huge axes to grind.
The non-profit prisoner reentry organization I’ve been the director of since 2005 works closely with men and women returning home from prison on an almost daily basis, so my finger is more firmly on the pulse of this population than most who hold themselves out to be experts … but have never been incarcerated. I earned my creds with this demographic many decades ago.
One critical point: finding employment for this population can be extremely challenging. However, if someone was associated with a gang while incarcerated, and those members who returned home in prior years offers a newly released individual a welcoming family, a means of income (albeit an illegal one) and a sense of no longer being a victim of a criminal justice system run amok … and all one has to do is pledge undying loyalty … just what the hell do you think the choice will be? What would yours be?
Two other recent books, one by noted Harvard Law professor William J. Stuntz (who died much too young at age 52), The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, and The New Jim Crow by Ohio State Law professor Michele Alexander, lay out in lucid, straightforward (and sometimes chilling) detail where we went wrong in this country in terms of criminal justice … and we now lock up a larger percentage of our citizenry than any nation has in the annuals of humankind.
Only fools argue that insane actions, even by powerful governments, don’t come without terrible consequences. History books are littered with such tales of propagandists turning wrongs into seemingly logical rights. And the lie that we can win the war on drugs simply by locking up more and more people is a specious fallacy that, increasingly, cannot stand up to the light of day.
But even criminals (who, in most cases, don’t really mind serving fair and just sentences … no matter how much they protest) know when they are being treated grossly unfairly … and all men, no matter in what epoch or era, will eventually begin to fight back against injustice. And they will do so by utilizing whatever methods are at their disposal — be they fair or foul. And the killing of innocent prosecutors is indeed foul.
To quote Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” It’s past time that we, as a nation, woke up.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.