“O Lord thou pluckest me out.”
In “The Fire Sermon,” the middle and longest section of “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, this line quoted from the “Confessions” by St. Augustine speaks to the futility of human endeavor. For me, this line — and this poem — have always held a deep personal meaning.
My brother has been in prison for much of both of our lives. During this long, unnecessary and protracted nadir of his life, he has missed some of its best joys: watching his daughter grow up, to mention the most salient. The decisions he made led him down a sad and barren path in life.
His middle name, Augustino, written across the envelopes of his letters, carries with it a grief that a proud family name should not. But even that grief is a luxurious abstraction for those of us on this side of the Plexiglas visitation window.
Prisoners garner little sympathy from the outside. If they are guilty as charged of their crimes, do they deserve any? For those who trespass against the public good, what waits for them is a supposedly deserved and destined cycle of release and incarceration, with sentences that lengthen upon every repetition.
It is, in a sense, a form of perdition.
Crime is thrown into the public circus for debate as either a problem of systemic inequality or personal responsibility.
These are not antitheses, despite popular belief.
Before a person ever commits a crime, circumstance may already be working against them.
While African-Americans make up a little more than one-fifth of the population of North Carolina, they make up almost half of the prison population. Suffice it to say that the individual merits of a case are not where every story begins.
To recognize that there are problems or inequities is not a slur on the justice system.
More likely than not, making good policy involves more than changing laws or adjusting enforcement. When the highest percentage of people entering the state prison system every year belongs to high school dropouts, the best crime fighting strategy for North Carolina might be to improve public education, wages and other social safeguards.
In other words, we can fight crime by not creating more criminals.
The United States has the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 738 prisoners per 100,000 people nationally. Compare that to England and Wales, with a rate of 148 per 100,000.
Some problems, however, can be fixed by changing enforcement. Simple drug possession amounts to 20 percent of all prison admissions, compared to trafficking, which is only 3 percent.
Somehow, admitting that our lives are subject to social forces has become tantamount to saying we have no free will. To the contrary; understanding the forces at work and addressing them properly gives us more control over our lives.
The paths we take in life are made in part by choice and in part by circumstance. When trying to design a fair and equitable justice system, we are better served to abandon the society-versus-individual dichotomy.
The risk we take is instead to set people up for failure and commit a far worse injustice: to create for ourselves our own wasteland.
Domenic R.A. Powell is a senior history and international
studies from Huntersville. Contact Domenic at powelldr@email.unc.edu.
