The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman, is
only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has criminalized
poverty.
Debbie Bourne, 45, was at her apartment in the Liberty Village
housing projects in Plainfield, N.J., on the afternoon of April 30 when
police banged on the door and pushed their way inside. The officers
ordered her, her daughter, 14, and her son, 22, who suffers from autism,
to sit down and not move and then began ransacking the home. Bourne’s
husband, from whom she was estranged and who was in the process of
moving out, was the target of the police, who suspected him of dealing
cocaine. As it turned out, the raid would cast a deep shadow over the
lives of three innocents—Bourne and her children.
The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman,
is only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has
criminalized poverty. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth
nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the
street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate
revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. This use of the bodies of the
poor to make money for corporations fuels the system of neoslavery that
defines our prison system.
Prisoners often work inside jails and prisons for nothing or at most
earn a dollar an hour. The court system has been gutted to deny the poor
adequate legal representation. Draconian drug laws send nonviolent
offenders to jail for staggering periods of time. Our prisons routinely
use solitary confinement, forms of humiliation and physical abuse to
keep prisoners broken and compliant, methods that international human
rights organizations have long defined as torture. Individuals and
corporations that profit from prisons in the United States perpetuate a
form of neoslavery. The ongoing
hunger strike by inmates in
the California prison system is a slave revolt, one that we must
encourage and support. The fate of the poor under our corporate state
will, if we remain indifferent and passive, become our own fate. This is
why on Wednesday I will join prison rights activists, including
Cornel West and
Michael Moore, in a one-day fast in solidarity with the hunger strike in the California prison system.
Read on....