CONCLUSION
The penal system is but a replica — in more brutal form because hidden from public view — of the larger society outside the walls. Each day, correction officials commit untold numbers of crimes against inmates. And the perpetrators of such crimes are, from a moral standpoint, far inferior to those who are being “corrected.”
Our justice system, both criminal and civil, is an injustice system. But this understanding is not sufficient. What is key is the realization that it is a class justice system, designed to protect the lives, property and rule of the oligarchy, who consider its racist character and other inequities not shameful but invaluable. The criminal justice system props up the criminal social system. Oppression of the poor, of people of color, and especially of African.-Americans, is vital to the maintenance of elite power, and the inequities of the criminal justice system can neither be understood nor addressed without understanding and addressing the social structure as a whole.
Therefore, efforts at criminal justice reform will prove ultimately futile if they are not part of the larger effort at fundamental social change.
And such change is coming. For when people become aware of their real interests, then the very idea of a small gang owning and controlling the vast resources of the country (and those of the rest of the world) including the people’s labor, the very idea of that gang having the right to appropriate for themselves what is produced by the physical and mental efforts of others, will be seen as the moral obscenity that it is. And so when the people are in charge, this barbaric state of affairs will come to an end. And all the corporate elite and their henchmen, all the media owners who themselves are part of the corporate elite, all the politicians who are the tools of the corporate elite and whose main job it is to throw sand in the eyes of the people— in a word, who are nothing but glorified con men — along with the whole army of professors and pundits, the well-fed clergy, all the ideologues whose job it is to demonstrate through learned books or else just the one Good Book that black is white and white black, that slavery is freedom and freedom slavery, all the hordes of government officials and bureaucrats who administer unjust laws or who, administer just laws in an unjust way — all these parasites will have to go out and find an honest living. And when the people are in charge, it will not simply mean casting a vote every so many years. The people will be actively engaged in planning their own future and then helping to execute those plans, from the national down to the neighborhood level .
In short, one day all the things we now can only lament as a “crying shame” will be dealt with as a shameful crime. And when that great day arrives, then the gates will swing open for the vast majority of the “degenerates,” “animals,” the “criminal element” now languishing in our dungeons. Then a truly people’s government will work to meet the needs and aspirations of the imprisoned, formerly imprisoned, or those who would ordinarily be heading for prison and which are, after all, only the normal needs and aspirations of all people.
Unfortunately, a prison population will remain, but this population will be largely composed of our formerly esteemed members of society, the leeches battening on the labor of others, the pathological liars known as politicians, and the higher-ups of “law enforcement.” In other words, the “upper crust” will be toast. But being optimistic by nature, I believe that it will be possible to rehabilitate such anti-social deviants, in spite of the fact that most of them are hardened career criminals. I believe these offenders can be reclaimed through education, a program of honest labor, and proper socialization.
When we say that the wrong people are in prison, it is not that all current prisoners are innocent, although because of their poverty and color many have been falsely convicted, or at least given more time than would have been the case had they greater resources and a white skin. The wrong people are in prison because those who commit the worst crimes are not in prison. The wrong people are in prison because while the crimes committed by street criminals are for the most part perpetrated out of the need to survive, or out of a righteous resentment and a keen sense of the social injustice which they see no way of overcoming, the crimes of the privileged are perpetrated with a sense of entitlement and expectation of impunity.
We have frequently referred to the elite’s insatiable greed.. In a certain sense we have been unfair. Their greed, while indisputable, does not stem from some moral defect. For their predatory behavior is dictated by their social and economic position. In the fiercely competitive dog-eat-dog, shark-eat-sardine world that is this system, to allow sentiments of humanity, compassion, fairness, etc., to enter into business decisions would be suicidal. For example, in order to stay in business, every business organization not only does but must rob its workers. For its profits are, derived from paying its workers less than the value that those workers produce. If this were not so, there would not be any purpose in hiring them in the first place. A famous French philosopher once said that “Property is theft,” and it is in this sense that he is absolutely correct. Thus, larceny is at the very heart of our system, is what makes the system tick.
