Its The Stupid, Stupid

As I am sometimes wont to do, I write this piece as a companion piece to a Corpus Juris post. This started out as a comment, but just got to unwieldy. Specifically, this is an extension of the wonderful piece CJ did yesterday titled "Homeland Security -- The Monster That Ate Criminal Justice" discussing the relentless prevalence of crime in our urban areas.

If you do much criminal defense work you see the judicial end of this up close and personal. I have. Not necessarily representing the various socio-cultural groups, whether they be minority or economic, because, to be honest, they could never afford the kind of fees my firm charged; but you see them in the arraignment and preliminary hearing courts you often go to, and also the same trial courtrooms your cases are in. If you have a client in custody, you get a very good taste of it when you visit them in the jail facilities. It has changed in the last ten years, but before that, if you were an attorney, and didn't have the queezies, they would let you wander, on your own, through all the security stuff and back into the various housing pods for the inmates to do your interview, client contact, or whatever you were there to do.

Pretty eye opening. It is truly a subculture. The common thing that struck me, and the statistics reported at all the fancy dan criminal lawyer group seminars and meetings I used to attend, like NACDL, support this completely; is that it is the hopelessness and lack of an education, necessary to open up possibilities, that is the common thread. I don't know if it is still true, I suspect that it is, but for many years the functional illiteracy rate of our incarcerated population was slightly above 85%. Think about that for a minute. Over 85% of the incarcerated population were/are functionally illiterate.

There is your common thread, it is the stupid. But our nice fat economic and political leaders don't want to address that. Instead it's the mexicans, the blacks, the single parent houselholds, the right to get abortions, not enough cops, not enough jails, not enough tough mandatory laws and on and on. Why? Easy. Education is hard, it is expensive, businesses don't make gross profits from it, and it doesn't appeal to the micromanaged demographics of anyone's "base". But whether it is cheap or easy aside, education is the closest thing to a magic silver bullet we have. Like Barney Fife, we need to take that bullet out of our pocket, load it up and fire. What could we have done for the health and wealth of the educational system in America with the two trillion some odd dollars that have gone down the sinkhole of Iraq? Our priorities are all wrong; we need to make knowledge and opportunity, not war.