COMPASSION, ACCOUNTABILITY & COURAGE While on one hand this place is full of shaved-head, muscular guys who seem to spend equal amounts of time eating and working out, the population is also peppered with grey hair, including right now three guys in wheelchairs. A bag man here as likely as not means someone wearing a cheap colostomy bag on his belt. It somehow just doesnt seem right to have older men suffering the daily indignities of kennel life. And even though they get plenty of compassionate consideration from their fellow inmates, the medical care comes with little caring. With the advent of home monitoring ankle bracelets theres really no reason why these folks cant be sent home to suffer out their sentences, especially since the camps are a special case for housing low-risk, non-violent felons. There is a process called compassionate release that may be signed off by the warden to send terminally ill men and women home to finish out their sentences along with their foreshortened lifespans. The caveat is that the identified victims of the felonies must be unanimous in approval of the release, and if they arent feeling compassionate as well, its no dice. With financial crimes, that can include large numbers of people designated as victims. Investors for instance, many of whom may be at considerable distance from the human being in question, may easily write off the guy who robbed them without a second thought from their own malicious motives. Case in point is my friend Larry Heim, who was a financial advisor (even had his own segment on CNN, The Heim Report) and now pushes a wheelchair, wears a bag, and has terminal prostate cancer. He made some greedy mistakes, some people lost some money, and some of those apparently arent willing to see him go home to finish his days. We expect him to go down and die here any day—hes in pretty bad shape. He expects to die here, and in fact is slowly dying before our eyes. To converse with someone who has lost all hope is a disconcerting thing. None of this is to reduce the seriousness of financial crimes. In a capitalist society, hanging economic offenders (with the exception of those too big to jail) in the village square, a.k.a the front pages and nightly news, has a presumed inhibitory effect for the larger population. Certainly with long sentences the incarcerated arent able to find legal means to make restitution. I dont know how one could realistically measure the effectiveness of such measures. Here, where we live and interact with these elderly bad players, it is cause more for anger at the human injustice of the crime and punishment ratio. But once one has been committed to the federal kennel, he or she is out of sight and mind for society. Years and decades of jail time definitely dont speed the prescribed restitution process, and present the hopeless possibility of realistically making whole the economic losses claimed by the prosecution. An exception to all of the above just sat down next to me. My friend Lee, a high-powered building contractor and developer from Anchorage, Alaska, has done a lot of soul searching during his two reasonable years of incarceration. Lees changed, deepened his spiritual connection, gained a huge amount of human insight and compassion, and its really sanded the edges of his Republican mindset. He became an unlikely pal of our friend James, a Mendocino pot dealer and talented singer-songwriter. Highly unlikely that he and I would have ever met each other out there in ordinary reality, we have in our time together found much that we agree upon and learned from each other, not to mention making intentions to one day meet again outside and look for entrepreneurial ways to work together to make the world a better place—at a profit, of course! Compassion is, I suppose, the theme of this dispatch, and it is the healing balm that we all need in all of our human relations. An uncaring federal bureaucratic machine driven by prosecutors counting coup for career advancement is the name of the prison game. Along with compassion accountability is the other element needed here—the two together amalgamated into a true system of justice. We have some real reform ahead of us to achieve this social goal, and many here have given up any hope of such change. Glimmers of hope remain, rumors pass like the creeping messages on the bottom of the TV screen, but the agents of change, the politicians, are cowards in the face of being charged with being soft on crime. The final solution: Compassion, Accountability, and Courage. Best wishes, -MM
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 02:19:24 +0000
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