It has to start

“It has to start somewhere.

It has to start sometime.

What better place than here?

What better time than now?”

-Rage Against the Machine, “Guerrilla Radio”

After getting my weekly dose of Bill Moyer’s Journal on Rocky Mountain PBS, I turned on the radio and was met by the sounds of RATM. System of a Down is playing now. These are all reminders. At some point along the way, the depression, the monotony of this existence, overwhelmed my will to fight, overpowered my impulse to write. There is so much work to be done in this world, so many reforms long since overdue, and the only ways I can participate in that work from inside this prison cell are through kindness to my fellow prisoners and by writing. Always by writing.

New disciplines and reestablished disciplines start with that seemingly insurmountable first step of deciding to stop contemplating, and to simply do the thing contemplated. Writing is my promise to myself that I haven’t given up.

“Drums and bells, flags and pennants are the means by which
one unifies the ears and eyes of the people.”

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As time passes and as I look, ever more critically, at the state of American culture, at the state of American legal proceedings, I become more and more convinced of a deep vein of sadism, pervasive throughout both our culture and our institutions. How else to explain the kinds of draconian sentences imposed by courts, the indifference to truth, the irrationally punitive approach of both our courts and our penitentiary system?

To take individuals convicted of property crimes or drug crimes and to subject them to habitual criminal sentences of 36, or 48, or 96 years, or to Life sentences, simply doesn’t make economic sense. The economic damage done by the vast majority of these people never attained the level of what it costs to imprison each of them for a single year. This is insanity.

But even in economically supportable cases, there seems a meanness, a joy in making another human being suffer, that confounds me. The great pleasure that the public has taken in Bernie Madoff’s 150 year sentence is bizarre. Here is a man that has caused a great deal of suffering for a large number of people, none of which will be changed by his incarceration. In his state of utter disgrace, he certainly poses no continued threat of fraud, at least not to anyone with any sense at all. It would seem much more logical to me to give the man his freedom, within certain strictures, to restrict or prohibit outright his working with financial instruments, and to commit a sizable portion of his continued earnings to a victims’ relief fund. Justice, as embodied in our legal institutions, should look more like logic, and far less like bloodlust.

[Editor's note: Todd Newmiller is incarcerated in Colorado where his conviction remains under litigation. He has always maintained his innocence. Details of his case are available at http://bearingfalsewitness.com.]