What are we going to do...as a society?
What are we going to do...as a society?
I was impressed by a note written in today's AJC by Azadeh Shahshahani regarding the incarceration of immigrants, and their rate of death under ICE's imprisonment operations.
(http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2009/06/11/shahshahanied_0611.html)
Azadeh writes well: facts, logic, consequences, challenges and possibilities are all there - all included. The sadness of the situation oozes out of her words, for me. Imagine dying under incarceration, being 'an illegal', incommunicated, vilified, cut-off from the world, at the mercy of a jailer and those jailed around you. Azadeh becomes that voice that just as Philip Alston, the UN Expert on Extrajudicial killings, call for "greater transparency and swift and public investigations for deaths in immigration detention".
Who else will care for those dying under a commercial, for profit - "the-longer-I_hold-you-here-the-more-money-we-make" - incarceration business that is growing remarkably in its profits and operations (even under this climate of world recession...!) and is becoming an industry 'of choice' within the United States: a nation that incarcerates at the highest rate in the world...more than 1 in 100 adults is now confined in an American jail or prison. Did you know that..."the US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."...? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration)
Did you also know that..."ICE has no legal reporting requirements when a death occurs in ICE custody."...? And there are at least 365 facilities out there, as of 2008! This, as reported by Philip Alston, the "UN Special Rapporteur...(who) Calls on the U.S. to Take Steps to Avoid Unlawful Killings", 30 June 2008. See...
(http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view0173409531EE29EEF8C12574780053EFC2?opendocument)
Furthermore, "On March 25, 2009 Amnesty International released a new report "Jailed without Justice" that exposes the immigrant detention system in the United States as broken and unnecessarily costly. You can read the report here:
(http://www.amnestyusa.org/uploads/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf).", as per Jared Feuer [jfeuer@aiusa.org], e-mail to GDW on June 12, '09.
If, as a recent Special Report by "HispanTelligence", 'The US Hispanic Economy in Transition" brings out, Hispanics account for 15.1% of the population...and it is expected that by 2050 that number will soar to 24.4% (one fourth of the US population), what needs to happen so that this phenomenon is integrated - healthily - into our society, before a huge portion of it is consumed by the maladies of the present repression against "immigrants", some of which are: no license for driving, no higher education, no legal recourse to income thru work (menial and forced, in most of the cases), no social services, etc.? Are we incubating a social malady at such a fast rate that second and third generation Hispanics (and other nationalities), growing also at an alarmingly fast rate, will constitute a 'fringe', an underground class, prone to crime, gangs, illiteracy, drugs, and consumption related sicknesses (overweight, diabetes, joint, heart and renal disease, etc.)?
Will these be the future 'clients' of sophisticated and governmentally integrated incarceration businesses? Are they an element being considered in this industry's strategic thinking as future sources of revenue?
Azadeh, yes: one death is bad enough. It is horrible! And it needs to be acted upon. But that death might just be a 'symptom' at this stage. The "canary in the miner's cave". Something needs to happen - quick - before our society sickens further, and it is doing so inadvertently. We need to integrate these fellow human beings into our fold, and help them, educate them, support them in leading wholesome, educated, principled lives, with dignity and opportunity. Otherwise, our 'world' as we know it, our society, will not turn out as we have dreamt it to be. The "protections" that were put in place for it, will result in its nemesis.
We need to start working on integration "ya"...now!
I was impressed by a note written in today's AJC by Azadeh Shahshahani regarding the incarceration of immigrants, and their rate of death under ICE's imprisonment operations.
(http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2009/06/11/shahshahanied_0611.html)
Azadeh writes well: facts, logic, consequences, challenges and possibilities are all there - all included. The sadness of the situation oozes out of her words, for me. Imagine dying under incarceration, being 'an illegal', incommunicated, vilified, cut-off from the world, at the mercy of a jailer and those jailed around you. Azadeh becomes that voice that just as Philip Alston, the UN Expert on Extrajudicial killings, call for "greater transparency and swift and public investigations for deaths in immigration detention".
Who else will care for those dying under a commercial, for profit - "the-longer-I_hold-you-here-the-more-money-we-make" - incarceration business that is growing remarkably in its profits and operations (even under this climate of world recession...!) and is becoming an industry 'of choice' within the United States: a nation that incarcerates at the highest rate in the world...more than 1 in 100 adults is now confined in an American jail or prison. Did you know that..."the US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."...? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration)
Did you also know that..."ICE has no legal reporting requirements when a death occurs in ICE custody."...? And there are at least 365 facilities out there, as of 2008! This, as reported by Philip Alston, the "UN Special Rapporteur...(who) Calls on the U.S. to Take Steps to Avoid Unlawful Killings", 30 June 2008. See...
(http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view0173409531EE29EEF8C12574780053EFC2?opendocument)
Furthermore, "On March 25, 2009 Amnesty International released a new report "Jailed without Justice" that exposes the immigrant detention system in the United States as broken and unnecessarily costly. You can read the report here:
(http://www.amnestyusa.org/uploads/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf).", as per Jared Feuer [jfeuer@aiusa.org], e-mail to GDW on June 12, '09.
If, as a recent Special Report by "HispanTelligence", 'The US Hispanic Economy in Transition" brings out, Hispanics account for 15.1% of the population...and it is expected that by 2050 that number will soar to 24.4% (one fourth of the US population), what needs to happen so that this phenomenon is integrated - healthily - into our society, before a huge portion of it is consumed by the maladies of the present repression against "immigrants", some of which are: no license for driving, no higher education, no legal recourse to income thru work (menial and forced, in most of the cases), no social services, etc.? Are we incubating a social malady at such a fast rate that second and third generation Hispanics (and other nationalities), growing also at an alarmingly fast rate, will constitute a 'fringe', an underground class, prone to crime, gangs, illiteracy, drugs, and consumption related sicknesses (overweight, diabetes, joint, heart and renal disease, etc.)?
Will these be the future 'clients' of sophisticated and governmentally integrated incarceration businesses? Are they an element being considered in this industry's strategic thinking as future sources of revenue?
Azadeh, yes: one death is bad enough. It is horrible! And it needs to be acted upon. But that death might just be a 'symptom' at this stage. The "canary in the miner's cave". Something needs to happen - quick - before our society sickens further, and it is doing so inadvertently. We need to integrate these fellow human beings into our fold, and help them, educate them, support them in leading wholesome, educated, principled lives, with dignity and opportunity. Otherwise, our 'world' as we know it, our society, will not turn out as we have dreamt it to be. The "protections" that were put in place for it, will result in its nemesis.
We need to start working on integration "ya"...now!
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