By Mark Drolette
Spot the absurdness:
"Bush Commutes Libby’s Prison Sentence" (Washington Post, July 3, 2007).
"Weed Eater thief gets 28 years to life" (Sacramento Bee, February 5, 2008).
Got it? Yep, that’s right: Why should the Weed Eater guy have any chance of parole?
As I’ve long said, when it comes to American justice, one thing’s for sure: No one can doubt whether it’s fair or not.
Seriously, though, it used to be when I saw a headline like the second one, I knew I was reading about some poor schmuck who lived in some backwards foreign land. Or Texas. (Yes, wise guy, there is a difference: none of the former have saddled us with Bushes.)
The worst part? The Weed Eater thief received his Les Misérables-worthy sentence in Auburn, California, just up the road from my hometown of Sacramento. (So much for provincialism.)
Then again, maybe 42-year-old Reginald Whitfield deserves being imprisoned for decades for heisting garden equipment. After all, one shouldn’t underestimate the danger of a country overrun by weeds. Think of all the terrorists who could hide in them.
But let’s let the judge be the judge. Here’s his honor Mark S. Curry explaining why he used the meat axe to mete out Whitfield’s sentence: "He’s been in and out of prison like it’s a revolving door."
Hmm. According to the Bee’s Art Campos: "Before being convicted for…the Weed Eaters [theft], Whitfield had been convicted for 1991 and 1993 armed robberies. In the first, he wrapped a shirt around his hand to simulate having a weapon and demanded $5 from his victim. In the second, he was caught taking food from a market and fought with security officers as he tried to escape."
Those are pretty heinous crimes, all right. Much worse than, say, helping cover up the outing of a CIA agent.
Shh! Hear that? It’s the sound of the world laughing at America, sardonically.
And why not? No one in his right mind could approve of punishment like Whitfield’s, yet check out the following sentiments posted in response to the online versions of Campos’ piece:
"Waste of Taxs’ Payers Money (sic), just cut his fingers off. He’ll never do it again!!!!"
"Maybe we should look at a spay and neuter day for repeat criminals, no sense in letting them breeding (sic) and screwing up more lives."
"What we need is a remote island far off the coast (so they can’t swim back) so we can ship these criminals there and save tax dollars. Another solution might be to chop off his hands so he can’t rob or steal any more, as is done in Islamic countries."
Sorta makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?
OK, so what is this compulsion, anyway, of many of our fellow citizens to punish out of all proportion, to demand retribution so extreme they’ll lustily support, for example, the obliteration and occupation of a nation that posed zero threat to ours? Isn’t this, like, kinda mean?
Perhaps Bob Altemeyer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba, can help. He’s spent decades researching authoritarianism and posits in his most recent book, The Authoritarians, "that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation." Writing that authoritarianism occurs when "followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want -- which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal," he observes that these followers "find it easier to bully, harass, punish, maim, torture, ‘eliminate,’ ‘liquidate,’ and ‘exterminate’ their victims than most people do," are "extra-punitive against law-breakers" and "admit it feels personally good, it makes them glad, to be able to punish a perpetrator."
Recognize any of these in a country near you(r heart)?
Having a nation fulla bullies, as we do, bodes ill for restoring sanity to sentencing or reducing America’s horrific prison numbers anytime soon. Human Rights Watch reports that statistics released by the oxymoronic U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) "show that at the end of 2006, more than 2.25 million persons were incarcerated in US prisons and jails, an all-time high. This number represents an incarceration rate of 751 per 100,000 US residents, the highest such rate in the world…"
Additionally, African American males are put away "at a rate 6.2 times higher than white men. Nearly 8 percent of all black men ages 30 to 34 in the United States were incarcerated as sentenced prisoners at the end of 2006."
Boy. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if there were still racism in America?
Is there any hope? Well, unless under interrogation by Homeland Security, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Imprisoning people is big business, no matter who’s locking ‘em up. (Per DOJ: "A total of 113,791 State and Federal prisoners were held in privately operated facilities at yearend 2006.")
They don’t call it the prison industry for nothing.
And so it goes. In the U.S, millions of meanies cheer draconian punishment for nickel-and-dime crimes yet utter nary a peep when a perp like Lewis Libby slithers free. What’s truly a crime, however, is how such types can’t see that every time the country they purportedly love so much senselessly locks away a soul, it loses another slice of its own.
(Truncated version originally published in the Sacramento News & Review.)
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