A Handwritten Letter and Pigs and Prison

right: two pigs not in the hole

It was raining and the doorbell rang.

On the porch was a neighbor's kid who was locked out.

She came in and sat down at the kitchen table with us all. My own daughters cornered her with the compliments that younger girls shower on older girls; mostly centering around her clothes and backpack.

Once settled, she pulled a letter out of the handful of mail in her hand. "My mom says if I'm the first one home that I should take the mail. And this one's for me," she beamed.

Sure enough the letter on top was for her. She opened up a handwritten letter and as the four of us sat around eating snacks, she proceeded to read out the contents. "It's from my dad."

As she began to read the letter outloud pausing to conquer an unfamiliar word here and there, I felt like stopping her, but let it go. I began concluding her dad was in prison. There was an apology from him and several 'I love you's.' I again felt like interupting, but she had the kind of pride in this letter that she needed to share with others. She finished up with his questions about what she did for Halloween and a self-addressed envelope. "We never have stamps in our house."

Marketta is 9 and one of 12 siblings. She is thoughtful and polite and probably more emotionally grown up than most kids her age.

A month ago the son of another neighbor resurfaced. I guessed he went to jail by the way his mother was evasive about his wherabouts. He has kids too. He's a good guy, but he also grew up in a society that is fundamentally flawed. A racist society. A society with rotten values based around money. A broken society.

According to the Bureau for Justice Statistics, a leg of the Department of Justice, over 7 million people are on probation, parole or incarcerated in jail or prison. Half of those incarcerated in state prisons are non-violent offenders. Some people need to be in prison. But many, many, do not.

There are many beneficiaries for the US having the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. The capitalist politicians love to get tough on crime to get elected. The mutli-billion dollar prison industrial complex makes a big chi-ching every time someone is found guilty, everytime a prison meal is served, everytime a new corrections facility is built.

For the children of those incarcerated, on the other hand, capitalism compounds the racism and poverty that bears down on them daily, by taking away their fathers and mothers.