Chris Hedges: ‘A Pipeline Straight to Jail’

[marmar]

from truthdig:


‘A Pipeline Straight to Jail’

Posted on Oct 11, 2015
By Chris Hedges


The defeat of the Harvard University debate team by a team from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility in the Catskills elucidates a truth known intimately by those of us who teach in prisons: that the failure of the American educational system to offer opportunities to the poor and the government’s abandonment of families and children living in blighted communities condemn millions of boys and girls, often of color, to a life of suffering, misery and early death. The income inequality, the trillions of dollars we divert to the war industry, the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas and the refusal to invest in our infrastructure wrecks life after innocent life.

I spent four years as a graduate student at Harvard University. Privilege, and especially white privilege, I discovered, is the primary prerequisite for attending an Ivy League university. I have also spent several years teaching in prisons. In class after class in prison, there is a core of students who could excel at Harvard. This is not hyperbolic, as the defeat of the Harvard debate team illustrates. But poverty condemned my students before they ever entered school. And as poverty expands, inflicting on communities and families a host of maladies including crime, addiction, rage, despair and hopelessness, the few remaining institutions that might intervene to lift the poor up are gutted or closed. Even when students in inner-city schools are not the targets of racial insults, racism worms into their lives because the institutions that should help them are nonexistent or deeply dysfunctional.

I stood outside a prison gate in Newark, N.J., at 7 a.m. last April 24. I waited for the release of one of my students, Boris Franklin, who had spent 11 years incarcerated. I had ridden to the gate with his mother, who spent her time reading Bible verses out loud in the car, and his sister. We watched him walk down the road toward us. He was wearing the baggy gray sweatpants, oversize white T-shirt and white Reeboks that prisoners purchase before their release. Franklin had laid out $50 for his new clothes. A prisoner in New Jersey earns $28 a month working in prison.

Franklin, with the broad shoulders and muscular chest and arms that come with years of lifting weights, clutched a manila envelope containing his medical records, instructions for parole, his birth certificate, his Social Security card and an ID issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles, his official form of identification. All his prison possessions, including his collection of roughly 100 books, had to be left behind. .....................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_pipeline_straight_to_jail_20151011

[Hydra]

1. The 1% stay in power by controlling opportunities

As information increasingly flows beyond their control, we see how they traffic in misery to keep their privilege intact while we also see how unamazing and petty they really are.

Maybe one day their time will be over.

[MisterP]

3. prisoners are already commoditized and then securitized: a portfolio can have 3.23 prisoners

on it through CCA and other Clinton contributors, half of a bet in Johannesburg that orchids will lose their price within 6 months, 65.23 charter students, and so on: it's "particle finance"

[KingCharlemagne]

2. Entire piece well worth the time - nt

[Octafish]

4. Send a kid to Harvard...

...Send a kid to prison. Costs about the same, per year.

“There is a stigma that comes with being poor,” he said. “If you are poor you are bad. You are worthless. You are ridiculed. You are picked on. Markets are built on this. This is how you can sell a kid from the inner city a pair of $200 sneakers. He is buying his identity. He is buying his self-esteem. And that’s why poor people hustle. That’s why I started hustling [drugs], to buy things. The gratification is immediate. You wear that stuff and it is like you are magically not poor anymore. It is a trigger to go back to selling drugs. I remember when I was struggling. I had grits one night for dinner because that was all that was in the cabinet. I panicked. By the next day I decided I would do something criminal to change my situation.”

Thank you, marmar for another important post and an outstanding essay from Hedges.