American Prison System: Multiplying Injustice

May 23, 2008
by Evans Munyemesha

The imprisonment of a father because of his daughter's academic problems (Father Jailed Because His Adult Daughter Fails to Get Her GED; May 11th, 2008 by Glenn Sacks), and Lew Rockwell's article, Prison Nation, drove me to ruminate upon the distresses which the prison system brings upon American society. We are all aware that the evils of our prison system are great and dreadful. Yet the very circumstance that we know this to be so seems not to animate us to that exertion which evil and distress should excite.

The intense suffering and deprivations which imprisonment inevitably entails upon private life are calamities that affect society as a whole by diminishing morality. A father or a husband can seldom be easily replaced as is evident, generally speaking, in the African American households.

By the Federal and State enslavement of the descendants of fiercely freedom-loving European immigrants and former slaves, there in unnoticed secrecy, millions retire, in silence, to hopeless poverty. To these, the common chant that "America is the land of the free," is a celebration of empty glory by a people which refuses to see that over them is an immense and paternalistic power, which takes upon itself to secure their interests by might.

This enormous power - invasive, unlimited, arrogant, and provident - bends and softens their will, guiding it in such a manner as to give the impression of self-government. This power, waging a systematic war against its own people without taking into consideration the fatal consequences, must be regarded as an agent of national destruction. If the legitimate measures of its prison system are to secure social order, they must first be shown to be on the side of right.

It seems that our society has a boundless capacity to tolerate the destruction of its members. The frequency with which this destruction is represented daily to our minds has almost extinguished our perception of its awfulness and horror. Every one knows that vice is contagious. The depravity of one man has always a tendency to deprave his neighbors, and it therefore requires no unusual acuteness to discover that the prodigious mass of immorality and crime which is accumulated by our prison system must have a powerful effect in demoralizing the public.

Thus, our society can not truly be said to be a moral authority (in relation to other societies), nor can the majority of its citizens be said to be free. For how could Americans be free when virtually every activity has been criminalized?

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When commentators discuss the American Prison System, they do not touch on the extent of its degradation of American life. They choose not to understand sufficiently that this degradation is the effect of the State. It is, I believe, fair to claim that a greater mass of human suffering and loss of human enjoyment within our society are occasioned by the State and its ever-growing prison system bureaucracy. But this consideration seems too remote to obtain public notice as the public is itself in favor of strengthening the prison system.

The great question, then, is whether American society will gain much by this "war against crime." The answer should be no, for the American Prison System - by depraving our morals and multiplying citizen hostilities - deducts from our liberties, and therefore could have no cogent reason to expect any long term gains from this extensive empire of terrors.

I do not pretend to side with criminals nor applaud their morals. But the notorious fact to be insisted upon is that this new peculiar institution is as evil as its predecessor. It reverses all the rules of morality. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices and corruptions are incorporated. It surely requires no special intelligence to note that a system whose foundation is the debasement of life ---repealing all the principles of virtue, and in which nearly all good judgment is excluded ---cannot secure justice nor elevate morals.

On the contrary, it multiplies injustices with the aid of the "torrent of laws" and perverts our morals by constantly restraining us from acting as free individuals.