Is anybody else horribly terrified that everything we’ve been raised to believe is a lie? Every institution that regiments our time and forces us to adhere to a specific set of procedures—all those years in school, every time you wait in line for medication at the hospital, every single second of dead space sitting in “Time out”— was set up to make us all more docile and easily manipulated cogs in this hierarchy enforced by abstract concepts and 300-year-old contracts.
I never paid much thought to the prison system but in reference to Michelle Alexandra’s “The New Jim Crow,” the whole prison system is jacked up—extrapolating minor crimes as an intolerable offense just to maintain the hierarchies already pre-established as the status quo.
And guess who suffers? As of 2010, State and Federal prisons held 1,446,000 sentenced male prisoners and of these, 451,600 (31.9%) were White, 561,400 (38.8%) were Black, and 327,200 (22.6%) were Hispanic. This is a substantial amount of the adult population that are being carted off and processed into systems that already strip them of their right to vote, their identities, and their freedom of choice.
While you may not think it affects the unincarcerated, the fact that the United States has the Highest incarceration rates in the world means that we also expend the most capital on prisoners in the world. We pay $24,000 per inmate per year, $5.1 billion in new prison construction, which then consumes $60 billion in budget expenditures.
Think about tuition hikes, all the money that could be used for the betterment of our country used to discipline people for petty misdemeanor that just happen to be the latest of three strikes. What are we living in and how can we change it?
The Dark Side Of The Womb 