Yesterday's News
Sam Aurelius Milam III
The
article presented below, Civilized Society, was written on April
15, 2015. I never got around to using the article and, sometime in
late February of this year, I realized that it was way too old to be useful.
So, I dropped the paper copy into my recycle basket and deleted the file
from the internal drive in my computer. Happily, I don't empty my
recycle basket very often and I have a lot of backup copies of the contents
of the internal drive.
Here's
what I realized about Civilized Society, before it was too late.
The information that I continue to receive from prisoners gives me the
impression that the circumstances addressed in Civilized Society
haven't improved in the two years since the article was written.
So, if my impression is correct, then the article hasn't been rendered
useless by time. Indeed, its age is what makes it relevant.
The article tells us that things haven't improved. Yesterday's article
is still reporting today's news.
Civilized Society
Robert H. Outman, Prisoner P-79939
The
federal court ruled on elderly in prison.
| A
civilized society locks up such people until age makes them harmless, but
it does not keep them in until they die.
81.5 F.2d 1195
US v. E. Jackson |
Yet, old and sick prisoners continue to die in California's prison system.
The
U.S. Supreme Court had to rule in 2011 that California was conducting cruel
and unusual punishment by overcrowding prisons, before the state begrudgingly
began to reduce the population of its 34 prisons. Rather than follow
the hint of the federal court to apply insight and revisit their obsession
with draconian long sentencing, our guardians of the public trust took
another approach. Like an obstinate child ordered to clean its room
sweeps dirt under the rug and just rearranges its clutter, the state basically
did the same. To pacify the court, prison officials and legislators
set to store 9000 prisoners out-of-state, engage in costly leases of private
prisons to warehouse prisoners, build more prisons, pump billions of dollars
to counties to stack prisoners in jail cells, and institute feckless legislation
giving the illusion of "reform". PRESTO! The population of
the original 34 prisons is reduced. Never mind the duplicity
and multi-billion dollar cost to the taxpayers, or further erosion to a
civilized society's soul.
Through
political smoke and mirrors, cruel and unusual overcrowding merely shifted
to county jails. The feckless legislation proves to be more rhetoric
than substance. Prisons are loaded with thousands of old prisoners
in wheelchairs, using walkers and limping about with canes. The officials'
answer to this uncivilized condition is that prisoners over the age of
60 years (except life without parole) and who have served 25 years straight
will be considered for parole. As of March 2015, the Associated Press
reported that, of the thousands of elderly and sick prisoners, 111 have
been granted parole but the governor has denied 20 of those grants and
17 are uncertain. So, the reality is that, of 8,000 plus elderly
prisoners, maybe 63 [sic] will breathe free air before they die.
To
continue to appease an insatiable appetite for punishment, the parole board,
like a cat playing with a mouse, offers the opportunity of parole to old
harmless prisoners, but ends up denying them on an average of 5 years.
Such a denial to an old prisoner is basically a cruel assurance of death
in prison. A rational person has to recognize this as more shameful
than civilized.
California's
prison system holds over 125,000 prisoners, at an annual cost in excess
of $12 billion.
Stray Thoughts
Sam Aurelius Milam III
In
science, any set of axioms or assumptions can be completely self-consistent,
and still be wrong.
In
a home or office, any unoccupied horizontal surface will spontaneously
attract clutter.
| March 2017 | Frontiersman,0c/o
4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507
http://frontiersman.org.uk/ |
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