OWSJ: No es lo Que Dicen

By Jason Flores-Williams for the Occupy Wall Street Journal

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

When you see prison movies or documentaries about prison, it’s all about the visits. Wives coming on Thursday, girlfriends coming Friday, kids coming on Saturday. But prison is really about distances and disconnection. It’s loneliness and estrangement. One person’s life is frozen while the other person’s life has movement. This creates fractures between people. The inmate is sitting in a cage thinking that everyone’s forgotten him, while the other is trying to survive in the ruins often left by the inmate.

Prison takes a terrible situation and makes it exponentially worse. Rather than healing or rehabilitating people, it deepens every wound, rips open every scab and spreads infection in every possible direction. Prison mutilates families. It takes whatever might have been once healthy, good or at least salvageable, and leaves it twisted and damaged beyond repair.

That the Christian family values people are the ones most in favor of the drug war, incarceration and severe punishment is one of the sickest and most grotesque cancers on our society. Nothing reveals the lie that is the Right in America more than the fact that these self-proclaimed lovers of liberty and personal freedoms are the ones most responsible for the draconian laws that have ripped families apart for generations. It is my fervent belief that the drug war—which has damaged millions of children and families for more than forty years across five continents—would have been addressed more pragmatically and sensibly if not for a pocket of right wing Christians in North America who have used it as a vehicle to express the blackness of their ugly and vindictive hearts.