"Prison Reform"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
May 16, 2004

Reading : Truck Driver - Gordon B. McKeeman
The other day I was driving on an expressway. These days expressway driving seems a frantic enterprise. Near one of the exit ramps, one of the highway denizens, a behemoth "semi" had pulled over onto the berm. The driver had emerged and was gathering some wild plants along the side of the road.

In that moment another stereotype bit the dust. I know what truck drivers are like. They are strong, burly masters of profanity, rootless gypsies who have neither homes nor families. They care not a whit for sunsets, mountain peaks, seashores, or wildflowers. But now I have seen one take the time to stop and look carefully at the splendor by the roadside. I've been by that very spot numerous times. Not once did I take the time or trouble to stop and look at the miracles of leaf and flower. Goodbye, shattered image! I think I shall not miss you at all! You were, it should be said, quite convenient. You allowed me the luxury of not having to think of truck drivers as real people, as varied as the vast diversity of wildflowers.

Stereotypic thinking does not impart solidity or dimensionality to an object. Quite the opposite: It dispenses with the details and eliminates the idiosyncrasies of individuals by making them members of a class of things, all of which have identical characteristics. Well, all truck drivers do have a common characteristic -- they do drive trucks. That may exhaust the list of characteristics they share. There's one of them, at least, who notices what is growing beside the road. Quite a feat, actually, at seventy miles an hour.

As the number of people inhabiting our little globe grows, so, I suppose, will the temptation to group people into classes, apply labels to them, and mistake the label for the far more complex reality. Perhaps the image of the truck driver stopping to gather wildflowers by the side of the road can be a reminder of how perilous, how depersonalizing, how diminishing such stereotypes can be. I've had a number of stereotypes pasted on me. As I pause to think about them, I like my own name better than any one of them. I have a hunch that others like their names as well, far better than a label and far, far better than a number. The struggle to maintain a sense of importance for each of us may be long and often difficult. The challenge is quite extraordinary every ordinary day.


Sermon: “Prison Reform”
Let me begin by saying all I know about prisons I have learned this week. What I knew before this week was summed up in the movie Shaw Shank Redemption a romanticized movie about prison and the people who live there. Prison is a place that isn’t pleasant that bad people go because they have done something wrong. While they are there they are given a chance to rethink their lives and when they return to the “outside” they have learned their lesson and paid their debt to society. Even if people who don’t belong in prison end up there they will eventually be found innocent and get out continuing to live their lives perhaps bettered by the experience. Our justice system tries to make better people out of the criminals.  

Not!

Prison is more and more often a for profit institution that takes in people sentenced there for punishment. This morning I would like to focus on the issues of race, mental health, and the general demographics of who goes to prison. I will offer you very little in the way of solutions but perhaps begin the process of awareness that leads us all to action. Perhaps shatter a few stereotypes, bringing us to that edge of awareness that begins all changes.

I will not be addressing the question of capital punishment this morning. Although this is an issue very much connected to the criminal justice system it deserves a sermon all its own.  

The issue of criminal justice is a social justice issue. It was designated the study issue for Unitarian Universalists this past year. Each year at General Assembly we vote on one issue to study. The hope is that through this study in local congregations we will have local change and even improvement in some key social concerns. Sometimes out of these study issues comes change at our national level. The office of Lesbian, gay, bisexual and Transgender concerns grew directly out of such a study issue many years ago. On the prison system issue we have web sites, books and videos available to us if we should in our interest, decide to go beyond today’s sermon.

We also have wonderful resources in this congregation. Bernard Gaulier, and Amy and Doug Weiss, who you met this morning, are people working in the prison and criminal justice system. There may be others. There may even be some of us who have spent some time as a client of the system though they would obviously be less likely to be forthcoming about that information. One of our fellow UUs, from First Church , in Detroit , will be doing a ministerial internship next year with the county jail. I will be her supervisor from the UUA. Any or all of these people would be great resources to us if we should head the call to action.

Just a few quick definitions: Jail is a place people go for short stays or while awaiting trials. They are not designed to be long term places. Prisons are for longer stays. Prisons are rated based on the level of security they provide the more violent people go to prisons that are at Level 4 what we might call maximum security.  

Where to start? Perhaps the best article available is an Atlantic monthly article from 1998. The focus of that article is the prison industrial complex.

“Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. … The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of Atlanta , St. Louis , Pittsburgh , Des Moines , and Miami behind bars. "We have embarked on a great social experiment," says Marc Mauer, the author of the upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. "No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control." The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States . Nevertheless, America 's prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.”[1]

But the percentage of those imprisoned for violent crimes has dropped. In 1980 about one half of those entering American prisons were convicted of a violent crime in 1995 it was one third. This trend was begun with the harsher drug laws that became a part of politics in the early 1970s. It began with Rockefeller as governor of New York wanting to show he was tough on crime. It quickly spread throughout the country creating laws that required 15 years to life mandatory sentencing for possession or selling of four ounces of an illegal drug. In the 80s we have Reagan’s war on drugs that resulted in still more harsh laws, and less money for treatment. Which spawned such laws as the California “three strikes and you’re in” law. This creates a situation where individuals are sent prison for a third offence in many cases without consideration of circumstances of the severity of the offence.

Prisons quickly became overcrowded and state resources were not able to keep up. It wasn’t long before private industry saw the possibilities. Companies that had built low income housing and management companies were soon offering to build and run prisons for state governments at a cost savings. Most of these prisons are built in rural communities were such income sources as logging, fishing and mining have declined. Twenty-five years ago the North Country of New York, had two prisons, there are now nineteen. Some communities now have more inmates then residents. This has had a tremendous economic impact on areas that are used to low wages for seasonal work. In some places prison work has increased local salaries as much as 50%.

And who are they serving? Since police tactics tend to focus on urban areas it doesn’t take much to conclude who will be arrested.[2] Blacks have a 33% chance of going to prison, while a Hispanic person faces a 17% and a white 6% chance of going to prison. For African Americans that means that nearly everyone knows someone in prison. It becomes an inevitable part of life.