The citizens of the United States have 200 billion of their dollars spent annually on the criminal justice systems, or more appositely stated, on the new plantation.  The total number of overseers employed by these plantations exceeds the collective total of employees of Wal-Mart, GM, and Ford, the three largest corporate employers in the USA who employ about 2.5 million Americans.  Presented with that set of facts, one does not have to be an Economics major to conclude that the economy has a vested interest in the survival of the plantation.  Yes, the economy needs crime and criminals, slaves.  Three million families are dependent upon the paycheck earned by the breadwinner working for the criminal justice system, and that three million does not take account of those businesses and persons who contract supplies and services to the plantation.  Did someone say long live crime?

Crime is not on life support, but its health is waning, irrespective of the hyper-dramatic and over inflated media accounts that are piped into our homes by cable, Dish, and DIRECTV each evening.  The truth of the matter is that crime peaked in 1992 and has continued to fall at a severe rate ever since.  Herein lies the problem:  millions of Americans are dependent upon the plantation for their bread and circus.  Fewer prisons and prisoners would be catastrophic, yet fewer people are breaking the law.  A conundrum?  Not really.  The slaves who are currently on the plantation must remain for longer periods.  As for the few who are emancipated after years of captivity, they must be incentivized to make haste in their return.  The hopeless must fail for the heartless to succeed, and I will show you two cases that are but a microcosm of just that.

Since the Department of Corrections merely punishes as opposed to correcting, with the help of my resilient wife, I corrected myself.   I relinquished all ties with gangs.  I quit gambling.  I started tutoring and mentoring.  I put every dollar that my mother left me into earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree.  I have been nothing short of a model inmate, often speaking on panels to outside visitors, and major incident report free for more than ten years.   A now retired, highly place prison official offered the following in support of my release to the Illinois review board:

…The past is our baggage; the gauge by which we are too often defined.  Johnny seems to have come to terms with his.  He knows and regrets it. He understands the need to remember but not dwell on it as the past is merely lessons, which, if learned and internalized, steel passion, drive and tenacity.  There are a number of men in our institution who deserve another chance and, if given, will manage to fritter it away.  I don’t believe Johnny Pippins is among that group. He came into prison a defiant, selfish, “cornered the market on enlightenment” man-child.  Despite all that is dysfunctional about the prison environment, he sought and discovered that which is redeeming and found purpose.  He beat the odds and deserves his second chance; this time as a fine citizen.

Even with the weight of all of the above, I was not allowed to leave the plantation.

The second case is a conversation that took place between two slaves concerning a recently emancipated slave.  The morning news broadcast carried a story of a former “eighty-five percenter” inmate who we called “Treetop.”  An “eighty-five percenter” is a state inmate that has been sentenced to serve 85%, or mandatory minimum, of their sentence under Bill Clinton’s infamous crime bill which he force fed to the states.  Treetop had served 18 years of his 25-year sentence, and had reoffended after having only been released for several weeks.  These two inmates were assuring each other how much of a stupid motherfucker Treetop was/is.   I was keeping my comments to myself until they asked what I thought.

I asked them if I were correct in assuming that whenever they put their car into reverse that their expectation was that the car would go backwards.  Of course, they both agreed.  I offered that Treetop went backward, because the Department of Corrections placed his gear in reverse.  One does not have to be able to split an atom in order to figure out that if you lock a person in a tiny bathroom with a twin bed in it for 18 years and then send him home with $100 and a GED that he is probably going to fail.  That is the expectation, the car is in reverse.  His mother is probably deceased, his wife or girlfriend moved on 15 years ago, his kids are grown—they do not know him or want to be bothered with him, and when he hears “on-line” he thinks that it has something to do with waiting to be served at the local supermarket.  He has no job skills, no work history, no post-secondary education, his drug problem nor any of his other pathologies have been dealt with, so the expectation would have to be that he is going to reoffend.  He did not possess the means or wherewithal to self-correct. He was incentivized to make a speedy return to the plantation.

I contend that the shame is not on Treetop, the slave, but is on the plantation and its overseers.  The taxpayers of the state paid more than $600,000 to incarcerate him ($36,000*17 years), and the return on their investment was someone who robbed a bank within a month.  Or was this investment made to keep 3 million Americans employed as was the case with the present writer?  In my own case I often think of Fredrick Douglas, given all of the résistance that I receive regarding school, in his writing entitled Narrative,

“…To use his own words further, he said, ‘if you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell.  A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.  Now if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.  He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.  As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm it would make him discontented and unhappy’….”

I am trying to leave the plantation, as I do not believe that I am any longer fit to be a slave, but the survival of the economy seems to be far more important.