Several years ago, I worked as a government scientist developing risk assessment protocols for clinical psychologists to use in predicting which prisoners coming out of prison were likely to commit certain kinds of serious crimes. However, I found out that my research was being misused for political purposes; that instead of being used to detect those rare individuals who are truly dangerous, it was being used to put away hundreds of low risk, non-dangerous persons in violation of their constitutional rights. It was even worse than that, the department was deliberately using methods that had no predictive value, was steering cases to psychologists who had known biases against the people they were interviewing, all to keep their $100 per hour gravy-train going.
I collected statistical data, documented the whole sordid business, and basically blew the whistle on the irregularities of the program. They put pressure on me to shut up, and when that didn’t work, they put pressure on my colleagues to say that my work wasn’t any good. And when that didn’t work, the agency got rid of the whole research section, claiming budgetary necessity. I found out that the much-touted protections for government whistle-blowers are non-existent. Instead of protecting people who come forward with evidence of wrong-doing, they take the side of those doing what is wrong, and they do their best to undermine, discredit and silence you.
The stress was more than I could bear, so I took early retirement. I got into drugs; I got busted; and despite the fact that it was in my late 50s, it was my first offense, and it was drug possession charge, I got sent to prison. (Basically, they threw the book at me because I refused to betray my friends.) In prison I found callous indifference to suffering, corruption, bad faith, and outright cruelty on a truly monumental scale. The experience so sickened and disgusted me, I that I decided to make no further contribution to society until it something was done address this crime against humanity.
Since getting out, I have spent my time researching the American criminal justice system, and I have found that the United States is the most punitive society on earth. It has 6% of the world’s population, but between 26% and 30% of the world’s prisoners. Not only does the U.S. imprison 5–12 times more people than other industrial democracies, it also punishes them much more severely. We are one of the few developed nations in the world that still has the death penalty; indeed, we are one of 6 countries that executes children—and in fact, we actually execute more children than all other countries combined. We are the only country that sentences children to life in prison without possibility of parole. We are the only country in the world that sends mentally ill people to prison rather than treatment, and the whole system is shot through with racism and cruelty. For every white man in prison there are 7 blacks, even though whites and blacks commit the same amount of time on a per capita basis.
Overt torture and medical neglect amounting to cruel and unusual punishment are commonplace. On any given day, 44,000 prisoners in America are subject to “solitary confinement,” most of them for lengths of time that drive them mad.
The problem, however, is not with the prison system per se, but with the society that allows human beings to be degraded and dehumanized out of an emotional fit of vengeance. There is a king of spiritual crisis in America, where one one-third to one-half of the population don’t believe the remainder to be “real Americans” and so is not willing to grant them the same rights of personhood. We seem to be a society that no longer believes that every human being has intrinsic worth, and that people who go astray are not worth redeeming. I encounter them in forums (not so much here) advocating the most extreme acts of brutality and sadism toward “criminals”—advocating things like the mass murder of prisoners to save themselves from the expense of having to feed them. This is the spiritual rot that gives rise to the politics of resentment, scapegoating, and fascism. It is a society that openly questions whether empathy is a good quality in a judge, and which puts “principle” over people’s welfare. It is a society in deep spiritual crisis which has grown steadily more punitive and unjust—as I have written elsewhere at length.
We have become a society where empathy and human solidarity is under strident attack—an uncivil society where people undermine and betray one another, and abuse each other for sport. It is a society which has lost the capacity for generosity, forgiveness and mercy, but instead, devalues people’s lives and thinks it can “save money” by disinvesting in human capital; denying people the means to make a legitimate living and driving them to crime and other forms of desperation, and then degrading them further; pushing people down and holding them down, if not crushing them utterly.
If we do not heal this spiritual sickness, we will be consumed as a society. We will not be able to pull ourselves together to act in our own interest. And we may set off a conflagration that could destroy the whole world, if not directly, but by crippling ourselves so that we are simply unable to do what is necessary to save ourselves from climate change (or some other impending crisis).
When I look around, I see plenty of reasons to feel disgusted and cynical. So, my spiritual journey is a constant struggle to affirm people’s humanity and their faith in humanity in the face of so much damning evidence. I think people are basically altruistic and desirous of serving humanity, but they are so often betrayed by their leaders and by one another. Nonetheless, one must do what one can. One person, one community at a time.
God and religion have nothing to do with it. We all partake of the human spirit, and as a consequence, we know full well when we are acting to suport it, as opposed to being simply just out for ourselves.
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