The “Other” in the Slammer

The criminal in P-B plays the role of the scapegoat for the society at large. The sins (shadow) of the community are projected onto the criminal (placed on the head of the criminal as scapegoat).  In that way, like the sacrificial goat, he is sacrificed, thereby removing the sins and thereby easing the conscience of those that remain outside the prison bars.

The statue of “Justice” stands holding the scales of justice and is blindfolded so she will be impartial. Justice in America is unconscious and is anything but impartial and is therefore lacking in compassion. The possibilities for injustice are tragically numerous as we shall see.

“Today, 2.3 million Americans are behind bars; the United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Convictions for non-violent crimes and relatively minor drug offenses—mostly possession, not sale—have accounted for the bulk of the increase in the prison population since the mid-1980”s.”  

The impact of this collective American reaction to crime is a direct reading on the level of the fear we have of the other. We lock up more people than any country in the world and the cost, of course, means there is less money to spend elsewhere in our communities. For example, California is spending more on its prisons than on its schools.

“African Americans are far more likely to get prison sentences for drug offenses than white offenders, even though studies have consistently shown that they are no more likely to use or sell drugs than whites.”  Being different in any way, skin color, religion, language, dress, etc. qualifies a person to be the other. African Americans have been the other since the founding of our country and continue to receive our projections.

The larger role the criminal justice system plays in our subconscious and in our economy, the harder it becomes to effect any change. “If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970’s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars. A million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would see their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structures that it is not going to fade away without a major shift in public consciousness.”  Most importantly we should add that this system is deeply rooted in our psychological structure (our story), which means, of course, that it is rooted in the shadow.

In our criminal justice system the criminals are multiplying like feral rabbits but what about the “justice” aspect. The rabbits are easy to find—but justice? Justice is much more elusive and a good case can be made that it hardly exists at all. Let’s run some more numbers. Because of the war on drugs and “get tough” sentencing policies, our nation’s prison population has quintupled in the last few decades. We must have had a lot of shadow material to project.

As we take a closer look at what’s happening in our courts we can see that indeed many of us would be surprised at how dark the collective American shadow has become. What are the specific constitutional rights that are being denied far too many people seeking justice in our courts?  “The Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including the right to be informed of charges against them, to an impartial, fair and speedy trial, to cross-examine witnesses and to the assistance of counsel.”

Do the accused actually experience these rights? No! More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury because most people forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty. Why? This is hard to believe until we look more closely at what happens.

Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute says, “The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used.”  In such a “rigged” system both justice and compassion are casualties.

Why do people facing a trial forfeit their constitutional rights? “The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”  We can see that if the level of fear is sufficient in American society, the Criminal Justice system is willing to suspend constitutional protections.

Now we bring the politicians into the system who are, of course, pandering to the electorate, who are in turn terrified of the other. To demonstrate that they are being tough on crime and to get votes, politicians have voted for stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, have insisted on the enforcement of the three-strikes laws and have supported harsh mandatory minimum sentences. All of this has resulted in power being shifted from judges to prosecutors who are, you guessed it, often politicians. This is part of the explanation of overcrowded prisons, but hold on, it gets worse.

A personal story is necessary to fully appreciate the reality of the suffering caused by shadow projection. “Take the case of Erma Faye Stewart, a single African-American mother of two who was arrested at age 30 in a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas, in 2000. In jail, with no one to care for her two young children, she began to panic. Though she maintained her innocence, her court-appointed lawyer told her to plead guilty, since the prosecutor offered probation. Ms. Stewart spent a month in jail, and then relented to a plea. She was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. Then her real punishment began: upon her release, Ms. Stewart was saddled with a felony record; she was destitute, barred from food stamps and evicted from public housing. Once they were homeless, Ms. Stewart’s children were taken away and placed in foster care. In the end, she lost everything even though she took the deal.”  Some deal! Some justice! Some shadow!

The rush to judgment on the part of the whole criminal justice system is so clearly demonstrated when a fear-driven projection of a community’s collective shadow settles on the first suspect grabbed by the police. In far too many cases, the evidence is flimsy and circumstantial or the result of a deal made with a jail-house snitch who overheard a confession that he can use to make a deal that benefits him. If the suspect is African American, mentally retarded, and easy to manipulate, then the whole mess can be quickly settled and the powers that be can appease the up-in-arms public and reduce the stress on all concerned—everyone except the suspect of course.

In 1982, Dorothy Edwards was murdered and the next day the police arrested her 23-year-old handyman, Edward Lee Elmore. The body had been discovered on Jan. 18, Elmore arrested on Jan.19, charged with first-degree murder on Jan. 21, tried the second week of April, found guilty by a jury that deliberated for 2 ½ hours and sentenced to death.

Edward Lee Elmore had an I.Q. of 61, couldn’t even tell time and of course had no idea of what was going on or what to do about it. His attorneys were of no help. Fortunately for Elmore his case was championed by Diana Holt, herself an ex-con (armed robbery) who turned her life around and graduated summa cum laude from community college and eventually from law school. Her passion, luckily for Elmore is righting the wrongs of injustice and even luckier for Elmore she was tenacious and patient. In 2009, 16 years after she first saw his file she persuaded a state judge to change his sentence from death to life imprisonment.  Read about this fascinating miscarriage of justice in Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong by Raymond Bonner (2012).

This past November Holt persuaded a federal appeals court to grant a new trial and two weeks ago the prosecutor and Holt struck a deal. Elmore pleaded guilty to the murder that he insists he didn’t commit and was set free after 11,000 days in jail. Why? Probably because everyone involved, after all this time, had to admit, at least to themselves, that Edward Lee Elmore had been an innocent scapegoat.

Don’t read this paragraph if you have a tenuous grasp of reality or are under a psychiatrist’s care or if you have a history of stress-related heart attacks. Criminal justice in P-B gets more than a little crazy. In 1993 the Supreme Court ruled that as long as a death row inmate had received a fair trial, he was not entitled to a federal stay of execution simply because evidence of his innocence had been discovered. What!!!? Oh my! This is now getting a bit “Kafkaesque.”

Franz Kafka (1883-1924 an Austrian author born in Prague which is now in the Czech Republic) knew something about being the other as a Jew in Prague during the reign of the Hapsburgs. Ironically, one of his books was entitled The Trial and his protagonist is a helpless individual caught in a mindless bureaucracy. The context in all of Kafka’s stories is definitely P-B with seemingly ordinary but dangerous and sometimes surreal systems entrapping individuals in much the same way we could all be ensnared in the U.S. criminal justice system. Just ask Erma Faye Stewart.

Or, you could ask the family of Trayvon Martin. The 17-year-old African American boy was shot to death in Florida because he was the other visiting his girlfriend’s father in a gated neighborhood where people of his color were unusual. An armed Neighborhood Watch vigilante, George Zimmerman, shot the unarmed Martin to death even though the police dispatcher told Zimmerman not to follow Martin. Zimmerman was not arrested and not charged initially and was free a week after the incident (March 2012).

If the situation had been reversed and the light-skinned Zimmerman had been shot by a Black Panther Neighborhood Watch vigilante, what would have happened to that African American trying to protect his neighborhood if he used deadly force allowable under Florida law?  You guessed it!  He would be the other and thrown in the slammer.

African American columnist Leonard Pitts who writes for the The Miami Herald understands that what happened in the Trayvon Martin incident involved paranoia, projection and the other. He understands that Trayvon Martin was a scapegoat for the collective shadow of the whole American community. “Though innocent of any crime, Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman. He was sacrificed for all our fears.”  It is imperative that the rest of us come to a similar understanding.

African Americans are not the only ones “enslaved” by our criminal justice system in P-B; every American participates and is a victim, and all Americans have lost something more important than their constitutional rights. A major shift in consciousness would reveal how systemic psychologically, politically, economically and socially this massive loss of freedom is and what the actual false-self dynamics are.

Interpreting the Constitution, upholding the rule of law is important to reduce fear and to prevent chaos, but American courts would be surprised to learn that a far more effective way to attain those goals would be to introduce the principle of compassion into their proceedings. Especially since common sense seems to have eluded their “Honors.”

_______________________________________________________________

References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Where Am I?  The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival