San Quentin and Prison Overcrowding

Laura Sullivan/NPR

NPR's All Things Considered aired a feature today about the crowding and segregation issues at San Quentin State Prison in California, listen to or read it here.

Reporter Laura Sullivan visited the crowded gymnasium shared by over 360 inmates and found the conditions abominable, due of course to the overcrowding problem in California's prison system. The prisoners occupy the gym 24 hours a day, the overhead lights stay on from 5 AM to midnight and simple amenities such as tube socks have been cut back because of funding issues. Combined with limited space this causes unwanted but necessary self-segregation to keep tensions down. The conditions sound like factory farms:

Metcalf arrives at a Spartan bunk draped with white towels. His broad shoulders nearly reach from his bunk to the next. "Man, we don't have a foot and a half between bunks," he laments, his voice rising. "Look at this. You're supposed to have so many cubic feet, but this is not it. We have barely a foot and half on each side of the bunk — where you can breathe in another person's mouth."

Just as Metcalf is about to show me his locker, a deafening alarm blares. Inmates drop to their knees. In the entire gym, I am the only person still standing. The alarm means there's a problem somewhere in this prison, but it's not here in the gym. Each officer carries a personal alarm that sounds systemwide. Somewhere, one of them has felt threatened enough to trigger it. The rule is hands and knees on the floor. If you don't obey, it's up to the tower guard to decide whether or not to shoot you.

An inmate huddled by his bed makes a motion toward my microphone.

"Would you want to live here?" he asks.

Most prisoners there are in for probation violations, many if not most drug related. Why they don't get those people on some sort of drug rehab program instead of rotating them through the system endlessly I don't understand. Ted Koppel covered this grim situation as well last fall on his program Koppel On Discovery in the episode "Breaking Point".

DN! airs readings from A People's History of the United States

Democracy Now! made good on their July 4 tradition of airing readings from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I listened to it a couple of years ago and an entire issue of Adbusters was adapted from Zinn's book in issue #53, "Hope And Memory".

First published more than a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. Howard Zinn gathered gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover, beginning with James Earl Jones.

The program is one hour long but incredibly good. The stories are from average everyday people about the events that really matter to our history as a nation and a people. Watch or listen to the program through the DN! site.

"I'm not fearing any man!"

Today is the anniversary of what is known as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I've been to the mountaintop" speech, delivered on this date in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. He was assassinated the following day.

You can listen to the speech, watch a segment and read the text here.

Next to his "I have a dream" speech this is one of my favorites. I'm not a person of faith but King's breadth and depth in religious allusion in this speech makes one humble. In it he spoke of the sanitation worker's strike he was there to support, the overcoming of injustice through history, and the war in Vietnam. He spoke of the progress made by the Civil Rights Movement, the political and economic tools that could be used to further the movement, and an attempt made on his life by a crazed woman who stabbed him with a knife. His exposition on this last point is the best, skip to about 4/5 the way through the audio player to hear it.

This speech is incredibly ominous. Not only does thunder roll in the background, but King declared at the end:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! So I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man!

They say he was so overcome at the end they had to help him to his seat. NPR covered this anniversary today and interviewed Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles who attended the speech. He would say to young people who have had less exposure to King that "we're not going to get to the place where we can say, 'Dr. King's dream has been realized. Now we can go to the beach.' That's not going to happen."

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On this topic something reached the news recently about a personal manuscript written by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. It was a reply to a letter sent from an abolitionist schoolteacher on behalf of 195 boys and girls from Concord, Massachusetts asking him to "free all the little slave children." In his reply he wrote "Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy and that, while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it."