Along with VCNV companions, I’m part of a 150 mile walk from Chicago to Thomson, IL, a small town in Northwest IL where the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is setting up an Administrative Maximum prison, also known as a Supermax. Prison laborers from U.S. minimum security prisons now labor to turn what once was an Illinois state prison into a federal supermax detention facility with 1900 cells that will confine prisoners for 23 hours of every day.
Razia, Maya, Sabia, Kathy, Libby and Buddy participate in a walk from Chicago to Thomson prison (Photo Credit: VCNV Photos)
Drivers seeing us with our signs often wave or honk approval as they whiz past us on the road. “Education not Incarceration” says one sign; “Build hospitals, not Prisons,” says another. But yesterday, a woman speaking with Maya Evans, who is from the UK, surprised us with her venom. After listening to Maya’s suggestion that U.S. people would be better off spending resources on health care and education, the woman said, “Well, if we would shoot the bastards, we wouldn’t have to put them in prison.” Razia, from Pakistan, also a walker, said “That’s what President Obama does overseas with the drone attacks.”
Razia’s right, I think, and sadly, as Adam Hochschild recently wrote in an article entitled Our Awful Prisons, “this prison-industrial complex is now as deeply rooted as its military counterpart. With both corporate profits and government salaries at stake, it will be equally…