American Gulag

This is a book that should not have to be written. The events it describes should not be occuring. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The prison industry is one of the fastest growing sectors of the American economy. It is an industry in which convicts are commodities and those who profit are the nation's predators. The media bewail the necessity for the system but gloss over the nature of the commodities and the means by which they are selected and harvested. That the real purpose of the system may be quite different than what the apologists tell us is something they ignore.

Foreword

Throughout history, political crimes have been punished more harshly than have crimes against persons or property. This fact alone often exposes the political nature of a purported crime. In the United States, a person convicted of possessing marijuana receives a sentence harsher than for armed robbery, and selling drugs is punished as severely as murder. That these 'crimes' are political is vehemently denied by authorities, who choose instead to euphemize them as 'victimless crimes'. It would seem our authorities are either irrational or shamelessly blinded by the self-serving side of what they do, for 'victimless crimes' is no more than a judicial oxymoron designed to mislead the unthinking. The victims of victimless crimes are those who sought to enjoy their lives and found themselves in jail instead, and the crimes against them are committed by the state. Half the convicts in our severely overcrowded prisons are locked up for non-violent drug offenses. They are being held not merely because they enjoyed themselves in a fashion not sanctioned by the government, but because their conduct implies a politics founded on the values proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, values which our authorities have now abridged, redefined, and relegated to the infrared end of our political spectrum where there is a great deal of heat but no light at all.

The Russian word gulag was transposed into English with the success of Alexander Soizhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelalgo which recounted the horrors of life in the political prisons strung out across the Soviet Union. So a gulag, as we all now know, is a political prison. America doesn't have such places because we're a democracy, have a Bill of Rights laws, and a history of freedom to protect us, and are obviously the nicest folks on the planet...

So much for the rhetoric. The proper response to all of this is incredulity. Our federal and state prisons are interlinked across the country in a web of political control that makes the Soviet model - though perhaps more brutal - a poor comparison. We are not a democracy - but I'll get into that later - the Bill of Rights has been emasculated, our laws manipulated, and our history of freedom proven a myth. I don't know about the rest of the nice people, but the adjective does't work for me. I'm just another cipher - and what follows is but one among millions of stories from the American Gulag.