Word: penal
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...permanence inherent in the law highlights its implicit social critique: our penal system has disintegrated to such a point that it serves no purpose except to keep the criminals off the street. A person walking out of jail is no better than he or she was before entering. Whereas jail was once seen as a place for penitence and growth, where people who went wrong could change themselves and improve, we now associate jail with an overly expensive and dangerous cage. In jail little of value occurs; instead, increased rage is generated. Those who emerge from the prison doors...
Ireland's Catholics had long identified with and supported America's abolitionist movements with a fervor they encouraged amongst their American kin. Religious persecution under the notorious British Penal Laws had driven Irish Catholics to New England by the thousands. As virtual slave laborers, the Irish ended up in black communities. They worked the same jobs, lived in the same neighborhoods, and engendered from the close, often intimate proximity, the first recorded incidence of 'mulattoes' as a census grouping in states like Pennsylvania...
...march in an unprecedented testimony to black self-responsibility and to the future of the black community. This march represents a resounding retort to the chilling statistic recently released that one third of all black males between the ages of 20 and 29 are somehow involved in the penal system, either on trial, in jail, or on parole...
Certainly that describes James' penal philosophy, unveiled in April, when Alabama became the nation's first state to restore the prison chain gang, putatively as an "experiment." Last week, judging the experiment successful, the James administration began strapping leg irons every day on 160 prisoners at the Limestone Correctional Facility so they could be sent to break rocks with sledgehammers...
Forcing prisoners to do hard--the hardest--labor is not an action we generally associate with today's American penal system. Soviet prisons in Siberia and German labor camps during World War II come to mind much more quickly. In most American prisons, convicts can opt to work various jobs for small wages. It has been many years since Robert Eliot Burns uncovered the horrors of chain gangs in Georgia: long lines of men chained together, endless hours in the unbearable sun and whippings for workers who did not satisfy supervisors...