 songs & lyrics Graveyard Of Forgotten Souls (Unreleased) Will there come a time in the future As with the great buffalo That we will look for our young And wonder where they did go? Will we recall we wiped them out To address a problem of 'savagery' As if this word, applied to our cure Didn't fit the definition so perfectly? Shimmering fig leaf in the Hudson We fashioned Liberty as an idol And while the poor begged our protection We made ourselves slaves No parole violation Can justify separation That leaves an infant yet to gaze up Into the eyes that made him All the love affairs blooming That could conquer the darkness Were tossed on the scrap heap Of our gigantic indifference With gates we plough families And with bars we divide them Turning the hearts of our fathers Away from their children And if we let go of prison What evil will befall us? Could it ever be worse Than this curse leashed upon us? Of simmering resentment And deep dark negation? The trains in our history Always stop at the same stations Stretched out without power On this rack of time Pray they won't stop At yours or mine Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City, 12-14 February 2007. THE FACTS ABOUT RIKERS ISLAND
According to stats* from 6 years ago, 65% of Rikers Island inmates are pre-trial detainees—"innocent before proven guilty"—yet conditions prisoners are kept in represent a blatant violation of their human rights. Less than 25% of inmates on "The Rock" were arrested for any form of violent crime—rather mostly drug offenses—with 80% having a history of substance abuse; with 92% being black or Hispanic, even though these ethnic groups comprise less than 50% of the New York City population; with 25% having been treated for mental illness, making Rikers the U.S.'s largest "mental institution"; and 30% of whom come from the city's population of homeless. Literally one-quarter of the approximately 15,000 resident inmates (the annual turnover is around 130,000 prisoners) face paupers' bails of $500 or less. According to the U.S. Department of Justice itself, "At year end 2006 there were 3,042 black male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,261 Hispanic male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males and 487 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males." The more you start reading and doing the research, the more blatantly obvious it becomes that these statistics say nothing about the differing propensities of any race to commit crimes but say everything about the racism of the system that sentences them. Rikers Island, as is true of all U.S. jails and prisons, is primarily an elections tool by which politicians wave the smoke & mirrors of incarceration to utterly falsely "make us feel safe" from people who are not dangerous and, in fact, need societal support, not societal exclusion. The tiny minority of pathological individuals who would cause people harm if free could be contained in a single institution. Instead, America has 1% of its entire population of 300 million imprisoned. The continuation and the expansion of the prison system provides massive, well-paid, grateful-to-politicians employment to the many hundreds of thousands of people who staff the criminal justice system—the police, judges and court officials, state prosecutors and attorneys, corrections officers, and the corporations that both supply prisons with their products and benefit from cheap prison labor unencumbered by any meaningful oversight into work conditions. As with every other system in America, the criminal justice system is utterly corrupt. The reality of prison is that our society has created a traumatizing, racial hatred-inciting, dumping ground for the brown-colored, non violent ghetto poor, homeless, drug addicts, and the mentally ill, that will one day blow back in all of our faces as surely as what happened to Rodney King set Los Angeles on fire. The people living in ghettos are under no illusions as to what prison is. Rikers Island costs taxpayers $860 million a year—twice as much, per inmate, as as would a residential care facility. Anyone who is in any way responsible for contributing to or perpetuating Rikers Island's—or any other modern dungeon's work—or anyone who is responsible at any level for sending people to jail, is a participant in an ongoing crime against humanity and offense to the God in whose image we humans were made. "The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion..." — the words Jesus read from Isaiah 61:1-3 at the start of his ministry, declaring that they defined his ministry. Nigel Parry, Easter 2008 *Statistics from the must-read book Inside Rikers: Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony, by Jennifer Wynn (St. Martin's Griffin, 2001). RELATED QUOTES "If you think health care in America is bad, you should look at mental health care," says Steve Leifman, who works as a special advisor on criminal justice and mental health for the Florida Supreme Court. More Americans receive mental health treatment in prisons and jails than hospitals or treatment centers. In fact, the country's largest psychiatric facility isn't even a hospital, it's a prison — New York City's Rikers Island, which holds an estimated 3,000 mentally ill inmates at any given time. Fifty years ago, the U.S. had nearly 600,000 state hospital beds for people suffering from mental illness. Today, because of federal and state funding cuts, that number has dwindled to 40,000. When the government began closing state-run hospitals in the 1980s, people suffering from mental illness had nowhere to go. Without proper treatment and care, many ended up in the last place anyone wants to be. "The one institution that can never say no to anybody is jail," Leifman says. "And what's worse, now we've given [the mentally ill] a criminal record." — from "De-Criminalizing Mental Illness", M.J. Stephey, TIME (8 August 2007) 
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