By
Brian Terrell
In
the final weeks of a six-month prison sentence for protesting remote-control
murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, I can
only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me
here. In these ominous times, it is
America's officials and judges and not the anarchists who exhibit the most
flagrant contempt for the rule of law and it is due to the malfeasance of these
that I owe the distinction of this sabbatical.
As
I share in the perspectives gained from residing in the federal prison camp in
Yankton, South Dakota, it is important to disclose that as a political prisoner
sent up on trumped misdemeanor charges for a few months, my situation is not
the same as my fellow inmates! All
nonviolent "offenders", most by far are prisoners of the war on drugs and most
are serving sentences of many years. I
also try to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the hardships and privations
I've suffered here. Certainly, doing
time in a minimum-security camp is easier time than in most other kinds of
jails. If basic necessities are barely
met, they are met. I am in good company
and time is passing with little drama and without fear. For me, these months have been more a test of
patience than of courage.
Still,
this is a hard place to be in many ways and it would be wrong to minimize what
people suffer here. Among these are the
basic humiliation of being numbered and then counted at intervals through the
day, frequent shakedowns, random frisks (stranger's fingers fumbling with a
lacerated heart, Solzhenitsyn
remembered) and strip searches, separation from family and friends, severely
limited visits, intercepted mail and interrupted phone calls, incessant noise
and overcrowding, petty rules arbitrarily enforced.
The
regime here is one of omnipresent and unrelieved bureaucracy. What I am experiencing over a few months as
inconvenience and minor irritation, cumulative over years can amount to a
crushing and ruinous burden.
"A
concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy," wrote Czech
novelist Milan Kundera. It is "a world
in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are secondary, and not
the least indispensable characteristics."
At
Yankton and in camps and prisons like it, the federal government has achieved
the complete obliteration of privacy as the drug war has increased America's
already bloated prison population seven-fold over the last twenty years. No country locks up more of its citizens for
such long sentences as the United States and it can be said, too, that the
government is taking strides to extend the obliteration of privacy to the
general population.
What
the government has not been able to accomplish by locking up suspected drug
users and dealers by the thousands is any reduction in addiction or in the sale
and use of illegal drugs. There is
little doubt that jailing drug-related "criminals" causes more and not less
drug use and crime and yet the so-called criminal-justice system is expending
an increasingly greater fortune in human and material resources on prisons,
contrary to the ends of public safety or rehabilitation.
Before
he retired, President Eisenhower warned of the emergence of a self-perpetuating
"military-industrial complex" producing weapons and provoking conflict for the
sake of ensuring a market for more weapons.
Likewise, America is increasingly in the grip of what some call a
"prison-industrial complex," building and filling prisons for the purpose of
ensuring fodder for more prisons.
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