AUGUST 10 is Prisoner's Justice Day in Canada and which prisoners in a number of countries, including the US seem to know about because sometimes they've mounted hunger strikes on this day. I doubt I'll ever see any kind of official observance of it in the US because of the ubiquity of the propaganda vilifying and demonizing and, worst of all, othering of those in prison. That's not to deny that many of those who are in prison should be there, as the sermon I praise below says, but that we all have a moral obligation to do a world more than we do to make sure that those in prison are confined under safe and humane conditions, that there is a real effort to rehabilitate those who could be and might be and to make sure that the conditions of their release are such that they will have a new chance at an honest life.
I hadn't known about this until I listened to today's mass said by Bishop Gary Gordon in which he gave a short speech before the mass and in his especially fine sermon, noting that it is also St. Lawrence day. He notes that anyone who claims to be a Christian is under a commandment of Jesus, "I was in prison and you visited me," in which Jesus explicitly said that someone who is imprisoned is the very embodiment of God.
I have a relative who is addicted to those putrid "reality TV" cop shows where they follow police around and watch them chase and arrest people. It seems one is on TV whenever I go there. The first one of those I ever heard of was C.O.P.S. which I was involuntarily subjected to a few times and I immediately saw that it was racist propaganda. It's also imprisonment propaganda, promoting imprisonment in a country with entirely too much of our population in prison. And, in so many cases, some of those who should most be in prison are protected by the entire "law enforcement" part of the government at every turn, look at the "DoJ" under the Trump regime and earlier presidents for just the federal part of that. If a single other Epstein class guy or gal goes to prison, I'll be shocked. On top of that, I have always subscribed to the line I heard near the end of Brecht-Weil's Happy End, "Knockin' over a bank's no crime compared to ownin' one."
Think about some poor person stuck in prison, today. Especially if they're guilty but the innocent ones too.
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