{"id":28349,"date":"2013-05-13T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=28349"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:53:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:53:07","slug":"drones-sanctions-and-the-prison-industrial-complex-a-catholic-worker-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/05\/drones-sanctions-and-the-prison-industrial-complex-a-catholic-worker-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Drones, Sanctions and the Prison Industrial Complex: A Catholic Worker Report"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"riotcops\"<\/a>

Welcome to Whiteman<\/p><\/div>\n

In the final weeks of a six month prison sentence for protesting remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri,\u00a0I can only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here.\u00a0 In these ominous times, it is America\u2019s officials and judges and not the anarchists who exhibit the most flagrant contempt for the rule of law and it is due to the malfeasance of these that I owe the distinction of this sabbatical.<\/p>\n

As I share in the perspectives gained from residing in the federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota, it is important to disclose that as a political prisoner sent up on trumped misdemeanor charges for a few months, my situation is not the same as my fellow inmates!\u00a0 All nonviolent \u201coffenders\u201d, most by far are prisoners of the war on drugs and most are serving sentences of many years.\u00a0 I also try to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the hardships and privations I\u2019ve suffered here.\u00a0 Certainly, doing time in a minimum security camp is easier time than in most other kinds of jails.\u00a0 If basic necessities are barely met, they are met.\u00a0 I am in good company and time is passing with little drama and without fear.\u00a0 For me, these months have been more a test of patience than of courage.<\/p>\n

Still, this is a hard place to be in many ways and it would be wrong to minimize what people suffer here.\u00a0 Among these are the basic humiliation of being numbered and then counted at intervals through the day, frequent shakedowns, random frisks (stranger\u2019s fingers fumbling with a lacerated heart, Solzhenitsyn remembered) and strip searches, separation from family and friends, severely limited visits, intercepted mail and interrupted phone calls, incessant noise and overcrowding, petty rules arbitrarily enforced.<\/p>\n

The regime here is one of omnipresent and unrelieved bureaucracy.\u00a0 What I am experiencing over a few months as inconvenience and minor irritation, cumulative over years can amount to a crushing and ruinous burden.<\/p>\n

\u201cA concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy,\u201d wrote Czech novelist Milan Kundera.\u00a0 It is \u201ca world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day.\u00a0 Brutality and violence are secondary, and not the least indispensible characteristics.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Yankton and in camps and prisons like it, the federal government has achieved the complete obliteration of privacy as the drug war has increased America\u2019s already bloated prison population sevenfold over the last twenty years.\u00a0 No country locks up more of its citizens for so long sentences as the United States and it can be said, too, that the government is taking strides to extend the obliteration of privacy to the general population.<\/p>\n

What the government has not been able to accomplish by locking up suspected drug users and dealers by the thousands is any reduction in addiction or in the sale and use of illegal drugs.\u00a0 There is little doubt that jailing drug related \u201ccriminals\u201d causes more and not less drug use and crime and yet the so-called criminal justice system is expending an increasingly greater fortune in human and material resources on prisons, contrary to the ends of public safety or rehabilitation.<\/p>\n

Before he retired, President Eisenhower warned of the emergence of a self-perpetuating \u201cmilitary industrial complex\u201d producing weapons and provoking conflict for the sake of ensuring a market for more weapons.\u00a0 Likewise, America is increasingly in the grip of what some call a \u201cprison industrial complex,\u201d building and filling prisons for the purpose of ensuring fodder for more prisons.<\/p>\n

The United States government does not run its foreign policy on any more enlightened or humane premise than it does its prisons.<\/p>\n

The refrain \u201cwe are creating enemies faster than we are killing (or capturing) them\u201d is a bit of truth that gets leaked to the media occasionally in recent years.\u00a0 Sometimes the sentiment is voiced by even the most senior military commanders and applied variously to any of several strategies, including night raids in Afghanistan, check points in Iraq, the prison at Guant\u00e1namo, and drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan.<\/p>\n

As with prisons, United States military and diplomatic policies run contrary to their stated objectives of peace and public safety and yet they persist with little question.\u00a0 Prisons and the military, America\u2019s dominant institutions, exist not to bring healing to domestic ills or relief for foreign threats but to exacerbate and manipulate them for the profit of the wealthiest few, at great cost and peril for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

One of many discouraging moments of the presidential campaign that ended just before I surrendered to authorities here in November, was in a debate where Mr. Obama stated that Americans need to \u201cdecide for themselves\u201d whose sanctions against Iran would be \u201cmore crippling,\u201d his or Mr. Romney\u2019s.\u00a0 This was an obscene and unacceptable choice.<\/p>\n

Sanctions are portrayed as a diplomatic alternative to war but in their application can be as lethal, warfare by another name.\u00a0 Sanctions that extend beyond trade in armaments to include embargoes on food, medicine, educational materials, and other necessities of life can constitute weapons of mass destruction in themselves.<\/p>\n

It is often said that such comprehensive and indiscriminant sanctions make prisons of the countries targeted with them.\u00a0 While the regime of sanctions against inmates here at Yankton is less severe than the brutal conditions I witnessed in Iraq in 1998 or that the United States imposes on the people of Iran or Gaza (by proxy), the comparison is apt.\u00a0 Sanctions and prisons are both about imposing economic and social isolation and both can raise levels of tension and fear when applied without conscience.<\/p>\n

Meaningful employment, decent housing, support of loved ones, education and self-respect would be helpful responses to the scourge of addiction and the crimes that ensue from it.\u00a0 Providing these for people at risk would be a priority for a responsible society but all these are robbed from inmates in federal prisons.\u00a0 Threats of war and terrorism are provoked by sanctions and invasions and can be countered only by addressing root causes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat father,\u201d Jesus asked, \u201cwould give a stone to a child who asks for bread?\u201d\u00a0 We know the answer and it is to our shame.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe choice is no longer between violence and non-violence,\u201d said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 As resources dwindle, the climate warms and nuclear arms proliferate, even more clearly now than in King\u2019s time, \u201cthe choice is between non-violence and non-existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The quality of life and the very existence of all of us depends on the security and well being of each person, especially of those we label criminal or enemy.\u00a0 The admonition from the Hebrew book of Proverbs to give food to our enemies when they are hungry and drink to them when they are thirsty, echoed in the Sermon on the Mount and the universal Golden Rule to treat others as we would be treated is no romantic, unobtainable dream.\u00a0 \u201cLove is the only solution\u201d to the human predicament, said Dorothy Day.\u00a0 Love in our time has become a hard, pragmatic, gritty requisite for survival.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Brian Terrell, a Catholic Worker and Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence will be released from prison on May 24, 2013.\u00a0 After that he can be reached at <\/i>brian@vcnv.org<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 warisacrime.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the final weeks of a six month prison sentence for protesting remote control murder by drones, I can only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here. In these ominous times, it is America\u2019s officials and judges and not the anarchists who exhibit the most flagrant contempt for the rule of law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,57,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america","category-militarism","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}