There is an old adage in politics, “if you ain’t at the table, you’re on the menu.”  That is to say, if no one is speaking up for your issue, then that issue will escape consideration.  Staying in the world of clichés, “power cedes nothing without demand.”

Many people have been speaking to the issue of criminal justice, according to their own description.  However, what they are calling Criminal Justice Reform is more correctly labeled Law Enforcement Reform.  My two cents of the criminal justice coin concerns prisoners, their treatment, and lack of reform.  More than forty years ago we Americans listened to the powers that be and embarked upon the path of lock ’em up and give ’em enough to stay alive.  This draconian stance has served but two ends:  ballooning the incarcerated population, and swelling the budget.

By virtue of my pen, I have invited myself to dinner.  Should you notice that my table etiquette is a bit lacking, bear in mind that I was all but raised on a slave plantation.

It goes without saying, no matter how egalitarian a society strives to be, human nature will bear out a need for jails and prisons.  A casual observer will encounter no difficulty finding criminality and inhumanity, even in the communities of the highest socio-economic reaches.  Utopia is a unicorn.  We need prisons.  The most progressively liberal soul can offer but tongue-in-cheek opposition to that assertion.  However, if we are indeed going to be a civilized society, who segregates the criminal and inhumane, would we not stand accused of dissimulation if not out and out hypocrisy, if we were to subject the criminal and the inhumane to crime and inhumanity of our own?

Another reality of the instant topic is that even once the criminal and inhumane are segregated within the confines of an institution, some of them will prove in need of even further corrective action.  Yet I am certain all will agree that depriving ANY human being of water is not a fitting course of corrective action.

We all know the “rule of 3’s” :  3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food.  Anything beyond these limits will almost always result in death.

The family of Terrill Thomas (who suffered from bipolar disorder), are trying to wrap their minds around the reality that their loved one went more than twice the prescribed 3 day limit without water.  Terrill suffered in a cell for seven days without water as a corrective action for violating jail rules, and he died of dehydration.  Punishing inmates by shutting off their water is considered a permissible corrective action in the Milwaukee County Jail under Sheriff David Clarke, who is a right wing, tea partying, orange Kool-Aid drinking, yessir bossin’, ill-informed, academic plagiarizing, testosterone deficient, should-have-been-a-miscarriage, self-hating, milksop miscreant. (I warned you that I was a bit uncouth and my table manners ain’t the best).

Further, in an absolute display of we-don’t-get-it-ness, the sheriff and his posse, just a few weeks after killing Terrill, turned off the water of two more inmates, who put the public at risk by covering their cell windows.  One of these inmates was actually “on suicide watch and coughing up blood” when they shut his water off.

Is this the best policy that tax payers can get for their 200 billion dollars a year?  And that figure does not include the tens of millions that will be paid out to the family of Terrill Thomas, since his death was ruled criminal by an inquest jury.

Were you to mistake Terrill Thomas’ death for an isolated incident, then that is exactly what you would be, mistaken.   These incidents are but a day at the office in the world of corrections.  Be on the lookout for my book, “If These Walls Could Talk” where I take the reader on a deep plunge into the cesspool of the American correctional system.  Most readers, I am sure, will be surprised by the crime and inhumanity being doled out by agents of the state.  From boiling a disabled man alive, to the rape of a female inmate so vicious she had to have rectal reconstructive surgery, to the shooting deaths of two handcuffed inmates, to starvation in private prisons, to rapes committed by chaplains, to the poisoning death of inmates by guards, to the murder for hire plots, and the list goes on and on and on.

There are those that would rather I shush, but ironically these same persons will recognize the First Amendment rights of a clan of mouth-breathing Neanderthals to carry tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville chanting simpleton Nazi rhetoric. Why the need to extinguish MY torch?  I’ve never endorsed or condoned even a hand slap of violence.  I’ve done nothing more but offer evidence to support policy change that would stifle recidivism and suppress the oxygen of ignorance that fuels the fire of violence in our streets.

There was another inmate who had the audacity to crash the dinner party.  He once said, “I came here to tell the truth.  If the truth is anti-American, blame the truth—not me.”  I fancy myself the less elegant, less intelligent, and less handsome step-cousin of brother Malcolm, and I too simply tell the truth.

I believe in the power of the pen, the ink of a scholar is far weightier than the blood of a martyr.  Based on that belief, I refuse to relinquish my seat at the table, and yes, I often talk with my mouth full.

Johnny Pippins