blogs/brentspodek

We are in the middle of Pesach, the holiday which celebrates the Exodus of our ancestors, the Israelites, going out from under oppression to build a more just society.

It is a fine and good thing for us to celebrate the freedoms we enjoy. The horrors of the 20th century are a constant reminder of how relentlessly oppressive governments can be and what a blessing it can be to live in this country.

And yet, we are painfully aware of how limited and imperfect that freedom is, how that freedom is available to some of us, but not all of us.

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. penal population has exploded more than sevenfold, from around 300,000 people to more than 2.2 million, most of that based on drug convictions.

More than that, imprisonment today, like slavery in Egypt, is a tool to oppress and manage a group of despised people. In Egypt, it was, the Israelites; in America today, it's the African American population.

In this month's Harper's Magazine, President Richard Nixon's domestic policy John Ehrlichman - the chief architect of the war on drugs - said, "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or to be black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Those lies and the structures built on them have an effect.

The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.

That's not an accident, that's not something that simply "happened" naturally. That is a plan.

The book of Leviticus (4:13) teaches what we should do if the whole community unknowingly sins, in a way that is hidden from our eyes. Rashi, the most important of the medieval commentaries on the Torah says this happens when communal leadership leads the community to sin and the people unknowingly follow suit.  That is exactly what we are doing right now.

Right now, there are approximately 53,000 inmates at 54 correctional facilities funded by the State of New York; the prison population is larger than the population of 17 New York Counties.

Here in Dutchess County, we just approved a new $192 million correctional facility including an expanded jail and new offices for sheriff Butch Anderson, who happens to be one of three co-chairs of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in New York. Here in Beacon an inmate named Sam Harrell was killed in Fishkill Correctional by people employed by us just a year ago.

In the words of my teacher, R. Abraham Joshua Heschel, some are guilty; all are responsible. Some set the policies; all of us allow those policies to be set.  We may not have been in the room when the Nixon administration intensified the war on black people, now known as the war on drugs -- but we are all responsible for trying to stop this systematic destruction of communities through mass incarceration.

One thing we can do now is to speak out against prolonged use of solitary confinement. If you live in Senate District 41, where BHA is located, you can email State Senator Sue Serino and ask her to to support Senate Bill S2659, which restricts the use of segregated confinement and creates alternative therapeutic and rehabilitative confinement options. If you are not in this district, you can sign a petition to Governor Cuomo here.

During Seder, we sang, ??? ?-? ?????? ?? / ??? ?-? ?????? ?? - Holy One, save us; Holy One, allow us to succeed. So may it be that by next year we do succeed in effecting change in our prison system and and we are saved from our own worst impulses as a society.