One Percent Solution Poem by gershon hepner

We have a one percent solution in
America for every crime,
and lock up one percent of those who sin.
The punishment of doing time
is now inflicted on the one percent
of people locked up in a cell.
although we call our leader President,
it seems he’s delegated hell
to Satan in an archipelago
that rivals one the Soviet Union
abandoned nearly twenty years ago:
with whom are we then in communion?
God blew the paradise He planned for Man
by locking him outside the Garden,
but there was not a prison in His plan,
since there was built in it a pardon.


Adam Liptak writes about the enormously high incarceration rate in the US (“1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says, ” NYT, February 28,2008) :
For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report. Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars. Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34. The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars, but that one in 100 black women is…
Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors, ” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.” He gave an example. “We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison, ” he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.” The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners. Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.”


2/28/08