Equal Access For All

The latest New York Review of Books has two prison related articles, one by Peter Mathiessen on Leonard Peltier, and another on the state of the U.S. prison system. Depressing stuff.

Peltier is considered by many to be a political prisoner, and there are obvious and extensive problems with his conviction. He was denied parole in July and won't be eligible again for 15 years, when he's 80. How one incident can be viewed so differently by the same court system is a mystery to me. The other two people who were tried in the case were found not guilty on the grounds of self-defense.

Whether or not race played a part in the Peltier case - he is a Native American and an AIM activist - it is increasingly hard to deny that race and incarceration in the U.S. are not related. More than 50% of the U.S. prison population is African American, and another 20% is Latino. Those numbers are obviously not on par with the ethnic make-up of the population.

Add in the fact that the U.S. has by far the highest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world and it's easy to see that something is very amiss. A shift in emphasis from rehabilitation to punitiveness has made sentences longer and prospects upon release dimmer. If you ignore race, the other commonalities that appear in the prison population are poverty and a lack of an education. Funny, it seems that wherever you go, if there's poverty there's a less educated populace and more crime.

Rehabilitation should be easier, better and cheaper than ever before. There is this new fangled technology out there that can connect people to information faster and cheaper than ever before. Something called the internet. There are online universities. There's Wikipedia. There are a trillion unique URLs and more than 100 million web sites. Not all of them are as informative and useful as, say, Social Edge, but it's not all dancing hamsters out there either.

The next time you here somebody talking about how net neutrality is an infringment of a corporation's right to free speech, ask yourself why it's so important for corporations to limit their customers' access to information. Ask why more people aren't up in arms because we don't all have equal access to the internet and the educational opportunities that such access affords.

Technology and easy access to information isn't enough, however. Our attitudes and priorities have to change before any real change is possible. Poverty, education and justice are issues that social entrepreneurs tackle every day in order to make the world a better, more equitable place. At some point, however, the haves are going to have to be convinced that there are better ways of eliminating the have nots than incarceration and separation. They have to realize that making everyone's lives better is in their own best interests. Segregation is never a reasonable, sustainable solution, be it as a result of race, religion, class, economics or any other differences that people have. A society that truly values and invests in equal opportunities for all and rehabilitation for those who miss out the first time around is a society that doesn't need to put 1 of every 150 of its citizens behind bars.