By Evelyn Bomer
Chair
As a part of the national Unitarian Universalists against the Death Penalty we fully support the moratorium initiative. In our welcoming address we hoped that this campaign can be expanded to include all aspects of the criminal "justice" system. From our committee’s work we know that many factors have worked together to produce the imprisonment of more people in the US than in any other industrialized country and that an inordinately large number of prisoners are Black, Latin, and Native American. For instance, racist laws make crimes out of many normal activities of youth — standing on a street corner with your friends, carrying a beeper to school so you can keep in touch with your family, and now, hanging in the wings, an ordinance against smoking and possessing cigarettes if you're under 18! Racist cops, with a license to beat and kill, target minority youth. Racist prosecutors and state’s attorneys (including now-mayor Richard Daly) stop at nothing to insure the people they think are guilty get sent to prison. Poor people of color are unable to get adequate legal assistance, and racist judges impose harsher sentences on minorities than whites. Injustice in the criminal "justice" system must be challenged at all these levels.
At some point we have to ask why — why, when the so-called serious crime rate has remained stable for 20 years, has the rate of imprisonment continued to rise? The number of people in state and federal prisons has risen from 316,000 in 1980 to 1.1 million in 1996 and is expected to increase an additional 43% by 2002. We believe the answer is an economic one — there are no jobs (in spite of the official lie about how strong the economy is) and so young unemployed people, especially black men, are put in jail where they are less likely to challenge a system that can't even provide them with jobs.
And ironically, once in jail, they get a job. They become part of the prison labor system, where they are literally worked as slaves. These jobs are not designed to "rehabilitate" prisoners but rather to make money for the companies that use them. In many places prison labor is being used to replace union labor, creating millions of dollars in profits for companies and putting even more non-prison workers out of jobs. One such place is Boeing Aviation in Seattle. At Boeing, prison slave-labor is subcontracted to make airplane parts. The use of prison labor by this important defense contractor is very significant because it could potentially allow the US war machine to continue functioning even if union workers went on strike.
We propose that one way to begin to expand the struggle against criminal "justice" is to call for a ban on prison labor, thereby removing the economic incentive to expand the prison system. We propose focusing first on Boeing, where the IAM union contract is up next summer, by calling on the union to demand an end to Boeing’s use of prison labor, and by calling on Boeing’s spokesperson Rev. Jesse Jackson to renounce its use.
Our jobs will not be finished until all the injustices in the criminal "justice" system are done away with. And so we see this Moratorium against the Death Penalty as an important first step toward a moratorium on all false imprisonment, all racist jails, all fascist killings of minorities by killer cops, and indeed as a first step toward doing away with all the injustices that make a criminal "justice" system necessary in the first place!