Shawshank Revisited (archive)

(archived from December 10, 2012)

by Scott Creighton

 

there is a harsh truth to face

When we allow for-profit prison corporations, Wall Street traded entities, to  lobby state and federal lawmakers for harsher sentences and even to insert minimum occupancy clauses in their contracts, and then allow them to open their correctional institution up to other for-profit enterprises, how is that unlike what the fascists did with the work camps in Germany? We pay them a little something? We pay them a little something so they can buy incredibly marketed up goods at what amounts to the new “company store”. We pay them a little something so the for-profit prison they are condemned to can back charge the inmates for medicine and other things they are already charging the state for so they can make even more profit. We pay them something now so that people like you won’t be completely disgusted with the new friendly face we are putting on modern day slavery.

Anyone remember the Shawshank Redemption? Anyone remember what happens when prisons are run like contracted plantations for cash under the table?

We have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet.

We put people in prison for lengthy terms for what amounts to a medical condition treated as such by the rest of the civilized world.

 

Most inmates in U.S. jails are there because they have an addiction problem and that ladies and gentlemen is a medical issue, not a moral one, not a measure of character. Even the “evil” Taliban, Islamic law, understands that. Everyone does but us. And there is a reason for that.

The reason is, they can decrease the surplus population while profiting off both the sale of the narcotics, which we import ourselves from cultivated fields in places like Columbia and Afghanistan which we protect, as well as the incarceration of the addicted citizens we now call inmate.

Now factor in the ability of various major corporations to profit from the prison labor pool and tax incentives bring jobs back into the U.S. for 3rd world slave wages and you will understand why the Obama administration is still locking up medical marijuana growers in California and promising to continue to arrest pot smokers in the two states which have recently made that act legal.

Destroying lives is a for profit enterprise in the United States. They do it with illegal wars, they do it by the controlled demolition of the economy so they can remake it in their neoliberal model, they do it by “compromising” on the destruction of the social safety net, they do it by imploding the public school system and Social Security,  and they are doing it (and have been for a very long time) with the “War on Drugs”

So-called “alternative” journalists talk endlessly about the 2012 NDAA which includes articles which would allow for the president to declare anyone can be indefinitely detained without charge in the U.S. and the rest of the world but they fail to point out that it has already been happening to a certain few segments of our society for a while.

Though the sentences handed down to addicts (half of the people in prisons these days are non-violent drug addicts who’s only crime was simple possession or violating terms of probation due to dirty urine) do have a finite duration, the reality is, once one of them becomes a valuable asset to the prison industry, they are far more likely to “commit some kind of violation” while in custody, thus increasing their stay and their obligation to the corporate state. It’s not hard to figure out. Happens all the time.

You could remake the Shawshank Redemption set in modern times instead of the 30s and it would be the exact same film with one exception: in the end the warden/production manager wouldn’t kill himself, he wouldn’t go to jail.He’d be promoted or he would simply slip through the revolving door into the public sector with a cushy corner office in an old stone building in downtown Washington.

Because in America we don’t see what he did as wrong anymore. It’s just business. “What are you? Anti-business?“

The corporate model when applied to public education kills it.

The corporate model when applied to healthcare kills it.

The corporate model when applied to government kills it.

The corporate model when applied to the military kills it… and many, many other collateral victims and soldiers as well.

And the corporate model, when applied to the corrections system, turns men and women disaffected from society by other corporate models, into slaves. By design.

As the character Red said in the movie, there is a harsh truth to face. So let’s face it.

We have an accelerating fascism growing in this country, quietly and without the requisite affected fanfare from the right or weeping from the left. It’s called “centrism’, “pragmatism”, “moderate” but never, never what it is: “neoliberalism”

We ignored it once before in Europe and in the end it cost hundreds of millions of lives to stop it. If it makes it easier for you apply the corporate model to our new revolution: apply the cost analysis theory to it. What does it cost to do it now as opposed to later?

It’s just good business.

Yes, there is a harsh truth to face. “Get busy living or get busy dyin”

There’s no beach in Mexico, no money under the rock. It’s not going to be that simple.

The pragmatic thing to do, the moderate thing to do, the adult thing to do, is to understand the horror as it unfolds and to make peace with your role in it. To negotiate for yourself and your family the best terms and conditions of your surrender as you can because you are only one, small in scope, pitted against an indoctrinated globe of pragmatic, moderate adults.

Many have done it. They’ve quit tilting at windmills. There is no outward shame in their affected peaceful existence and as long as they close one eye, the world seems much clearer.

But for some, maybe more than you think, being an adult in the New World means something else. Something harder. Something braver. Something better.

“I find I’m so excited that I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel. A free man at a start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.”