Proudly South African Parasite Hypocrisy: Fraudulent 'Rehabilitation' Boomerang..... 'Kaffirs' aka 'Criminals'

“Maybe the decision of the ANC youth cadres to take up witchhunting, was also based on the calculation, that party politics and revolutionary slogans would not be sufficient for mobilizing the population. Witchhunts on the other hand seemed to be a common cause for which one could expect broad-based support.” (1993:527) Isak Niehaus shows how witchcraft was politicised .. and how the ANC and other political groups used witchcraft beliefs to further their own agendas. [Relationship: African Occult & African Criminality?] [Africanisation of RSA: ANC's Occult “Struggle” Politics] [AIDS, Witchcraft, and Power in Post-Apartheid SA]

Are Violent Criminals in South Africa proud or ashamed of their violence? Does the black community admire violent criminals? Do these violent predators target those who are afraid of them; and do they experience orgiastic pleasure from their violence?

Is the South African Government concerned about protecting those who are afraid of the predators, from the predators? Or does the South African Government itself experience intellectual, psychological and sexual orgiastic pleasure from observing the fear of those they hate, being tortured and attacked by the predators?

The following is an excerpt from a document delivered to South African Government Officials in 2004, an insider account of whether in South Africa, violent criminals are proud or ashamed of their violent predatorial acts; whether they target those whose fear they can smell, and whether targeting individuals who are afraid, gives them orgiastic pleasure...

On 29 September 2003, in George Correctional Services Women's Prison, seven juvenile female prisoners high on marijuana and mandrax spent hours torturing and assaulting a fellow juvenile woman prisoner by among other things: stuffing her mouth with floor polish, forcing her to undress and dance naked for them, burning her with a hot iron, repeatedly beating and assaulting her with metal objects and a broken sharp aluminium broom handle, sodomizing her and sexually assaulting her, until the dormitory cell was covered with blood.

Not much different or less disturbing than Ms. Lyndie England's behaviour! Ms. England actions were considered disgusting to an enemy in the process of war, and made the worlds front pages. South Africa's abusers were simply having a bit of South African prisoner orgasmic fun, and their fun didn't even make contact with the local newspaper! ....

The entire assault episode involved a party of individuals experiencing acute pleasure, entertainment and power in their violent and dehumanizing behaviour to a scapegoat, so much so, they spoke and laughed about it publically for days and weeks afterwards! Do you have any idea how much violence, abuse and aggression is glorified and enjoyed by prisoners in South African prisons? Do you care in the slightest?

04-06-11: An Essay on Proudly South African Parasite Hypocrisy:

Fraudulent 'Rehabilitation' Boomerang..

Overview of Documentation:

11 June 2004: An Essay on Proudly South African Parasite Hypocrisy: Fraudulent 'Rehabilitation' Boomerang: Correctional Services Prison Policies As A Major Intentional Source of New South Africa's 'Kaffirs' AKA 'Criminals' [GooglePDF:118K||Scribd PDF]

Cover Letter: 18 June 2004: To: Judge JJ Fagan; re: RE: Request Forwarding of attached essay, Fraudulent 'Rehabilitation Boomerang: Correctional Services Prison Policies As A Major Intentional Source of New South Africa's 'Kaffirs' AKA 'Criminals' [PDF:P01:328KB].

Doc. Submitted to: Minister of Corrections: Mr. Balfour; Insp. Judge of Prisons: Judge JJ Fagan; Dir. Public Prosecutions: Mr. B. Ngcuka; Public Protector: Mr. Mushwana; Lawyers for Human Rights: Dr. V Gaivhand; Nat. Assoc of Dem. Lawyers: Adv S Nkanunu; Const. Court: Chief Justice A. Chaskalson; DA Leader: Mr. Tony Leon

DA Response: 13 July 2004: Response from DA: Mr. J. Selfe, MP: RE: Fraudulent Rehabilitation Boomerang [Google PDF:P01:255KB || Scribd PDF]

Response to DA Mr. Selfe, MP: 15 August 2004: The Jury's Verdict on Dept. of Correctional Services' "Fraudulent 'Rehabilitation' Boomerang"? [Google PDF:P02:1553KB|| Scribd PDF]

Document Outline:

• Forward: Social Engineers or Parasites
  
• Introduction: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
  
• Incarceration's Consequences on Community Development and Human Capital
  
• Social Functioning Process Problems: Our Social Systems Destructive Social Character vs Creative Morality
  
• The Obedient Sado-Masochist Bureaucrat's Blueprint for Criminal Justice Policies
  
• Does South Africa's punishment masquerading as 'rehabilitation' political penal policy exist not to deter criminality, but to covertly serve our latent desire for vengeance and superiority?
  
• Dissent, or, Obedience and Conformity to Authority?
  
• Proudly South African: Unconsciously United in the Pathology of Aggression, Violence & Revenge
  
• Interactive Action-Oriented Living Laboratory Mentoring Voluntary Offer
  
• HOW: Reciprocity: Alternative Models of the Social Correctional Expert
  
• WHY: Building Psychic Freedom Muscles: Regular and safe draining off of Rage, Anger & Hopelessness
  
• WHO: Mutual-Help Destiny-Control Colleagues: A Guide for Peaceful Revolution in South Africa
  
• Conclusion: Your Crime Against Criminals & Yourselves
  
• POSTSCRIPT: Are YOU a Social Engineer or a Parasite?

[Excerpts from]
An Essay on Proudly South African Parasite Hypocrisy
By Lara Johnson, aka Lara Johnstone, Lara Braveheart

June 11, 2004
Dedicated to Robert Redford's Prisoner Warden 'Brubaker';
On the Anniversary of TJM's Freedom Forgiveness Day;
In Loving Memory of Prison Reformer Prof. Richard Korn;
and With Appreciation to Prisoners Demian Emile Johnson (CA):
All Social Engineer Truth-Tellers Extra-Ordinaire
***************

Fraudulent 'Rehabilitation' Boomerang:

Correctional Services Prison Policies As A Major Intentional Source of New South Africa's 'Kaffirs' AKA 'Criminals'

Forward: Social Engineers or Parasites

Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality; By Richard Kluger [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

'Howard Law School became a living laboratory where civil-rights law was invented by teamwork. The school worked because of the driving purposefulness of one man: Charlie Houston. He kept hammering at us all those years that, as lawyers, we had to be social engineers or else we were parasites. The whole atmosphere of action-oriented learning under Houston was heady, and every scholar was eager to relate classroom work to social action. We all worked on real briefs and real cases and accompanied Houston and other faculty members to court to learn procedure and tactics. Charlie Houston set out to teach us the difference between what the laws said and meant and how they were applied. His avowed aim was to eliminate that difference. He made it clear to us that when we were done, we were expected to go out and do something with our lives. He was a man you either liked intensely or hated.'
-- Former Howard Law School student --

Charlie Houston and Howard Law School's top graduate of 1933, Thurgood Marshall, later to become a US Supreme Court Justice, demonstrated another knack that would enhance his career: he listened. It was not simply that he was deferential; rather, he never thought he knew all the answers. His way to wisdom was to hear out others who might or might not know any more than he did and then to sift it all through his own mental strainer. He never tried to score points as an original or especially creative thinker; his skill was in figuring out who made the most sense -- or what parts of other people's ideas to sieze upon and fuse into a prudent plan of action. "He'll take ideas from a chimneysweep if they sound right to him," said a former associate. [1]

I might, or might not know any more than what you do, but maybe you'll hear me out before you decide whether any of what I have to say makes any sense. If not, my apologies for wasting your time. Alternatively, it's quite possible that the implications of what I imply in this essay, borrowing heavily from expert wisdom, may be too disturbing to seriously contemplate, to all but the obtuse; but to ignore them (or the evidence itself) would be an attempt at denial which would constitute a surrender to deliberate indifference. You avoid acknowledging what you don't wish to see; you do not know what is really happening in the South African criminal justice system and it's prisons because you do not want to know what is really happening, possibly because you benefit from the current status-quo arrangement, and denial helps to protect your flickering consciences, while you pretentiously and hypocritically profess to care about the politically expedient victims of crime, parasitically feeding off the blood of the politically stigmatized victims of crime.



Introduction: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

John Maher of Delancey Street: A guide to peaceful revolution in America; By Grover Sales [*Amazon*] “Delancey Street is an incredible mixture of pure idealism and hard practicality. It is the best and the most successful [criminal rehabilitation] organization I have studied in the world” — Dr. Karl Menninger

"The inescapable conclusion is that society secretly wants crime, needs crime, and gains definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it. We condemn crime; we punish offenders for it; but we need it. The crime and punishment ritual is a part of our lives. We need crimes to wonder at, to enjoy vicariously, to discuss and speculate about, and to publicly deplore. We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to envy secretly, and to punish stoutly. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, they bear the burdens of our displaced guilt and punishment -- "the iniquities of us all."
-- Dr. Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment --

Entertain the idea that the goals and aims of the South African criminal justice system are not to reduce crime or to achieve justice, but to project to the South African public a visible image of the threat of crime. To do this, it must maintain the existence of a sizable population of criminals and it must fail in the struggle to reduce crime. Does the South African criminal justice system maintain the existence of a sizable population of criminals and is it failing in the struggle to reduce crime? Do car-jackings, rapes, baby-rapes, murder, executions, farm-killings, robbery, theft, corruption, etc project to the South African public a visible image of the threat of crime? [5]

There is more. Do we know that prison produces more criminals than it cures? Do we know the percentage of inmates in our prisons who are not there for the first time? Do we know that prisoners are denied autonomy and privacy and are subjected to indignaties, dehumanization, and acts of violence as regular features of their confinement -- all of which are heightened by overcrowding, and severely heightened by severe overcrowding? [10]

In The Pains of Imprisonment, Robert Johnson and Hans Toch, state that the predictable result of such a penological policy is "that the prison's survivors become tougher, more pugnacious, and less able to feel for themselves and others while it's nonsurvivors become weaker, more susceptible, and less able to control their lives." In other words more aggression, violence, apathy, fear, hopelessness and helplessness. Additionally, such a policy denies prisoners the training, responsibility, and capability to handle daily problems in competent and socially constructive ways, inside or outside of prison. Once on the outside, burdened with the stigma of a prison record and rarely trained in a marketable skill, ex-prisoners find few opportunities for noncriminal employment open to them. [10]

Should we then really pretend that we do not KNOW why ex-prisoners turn to crime? Can we honestly act as if we do not know that our prison system (combined with our failure to ensure a meaningful postrelease noncriminal alternative for the ex-convict) is a major SOURCE of crime? Yet do we do little to really change the nature of our prisons or to provide real services to ex-convicts? Instead does the Department of Corrections spend an inordinate amount of funds on hypocritically informing taxpayers via public relations propaganda about its alleged official 'rehabilitation' policy and programs? Has the Department of Corrections legally defined 'rehabilitation', or is it conveniently one of those Orwellian double-speak smoke and mirrors concepts which confuse, both it's employees, taxpayer funders and prisoner clients? [10]

How many rightly demand to know how and why a society and it's administrators, legislators and adjudicators would obediently and subserviently tolerate a criminal justice system designed to fail in the fight against crime, by intentionally creating more criminals? Do our Nothings Succeeds Like Failure Criminal Justice Policies, affect our businesses, and community's human capital and development? What are you proactively doing about it, or have you done about it? Increased prisoners family visiting, maybe?

[SNIP]



Social Functioning Process Problems: Our South African Social System's Destructive Social Character vs Creative Morality

"Creative Morality: Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. It's interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are "itself." It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the "Well" it wishes others is not security but liberty."
-- Alan W. Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for An Age of Anxiety --

Renowned social psychologist, Erich Fromm states that various psychiatric theories postulate that if we want to understand how human energy is channeled and operates as a productive or destructive force within a given social system, then the social character deserves our main interest. Social character is the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of the group, and is a key concept for the understanding of the social functioning process. An individuals character determines his or her action, inaction and adaptation within a particular social system. [9]

The term 'character' is in the Freudian dynamic sense. In this sense it does not refer to the sum total of behaviour patterns characteristic for a person, but to the dominant drives and subconscious motivations which motivate his behaviour and grant him psychological satisfaction. Put differently, we are what we are devoted to and what we are devoted to is what motives our conduct. [9]

Everyone's life is driven or motivated by something. We may be driven by a problem, a pressure, a painful memory, a haunting fear, or an unconscious belief. There are hundreds of circumstances, values, emotions and beliefs that can motivate our lives. The five most common motivating forces are: - (i) Guilt: people who spend their entire lives running from regrets and hiding their shame, manipulated by their memories, allowing their past to control their future. Instead of simply being a product of their past, they are prisoners of their past. (ii) Resentment and Anger: people who hold onto hurts and never get over them. Instead of releasing their pain through forgiveness, they rehearse it over and over in their minds and actions. They internalize and express their anger in passive aggressive ways. (iii) Fear: as a result of a traumatic experience, unrealistic expectations, family upbringing, fear-driven people often miss great opportunities because they are so petrified to venture out and take a risk now and then. Instead they play it safe, are desperate for all forms of security, avoid risks and try to maintain the status-quo. Fear is a self-imposed prison. (iv) Materialism/Money: people whose desire to acquire and acquire becomes the whole goal of their lives. They think that having more will make them more happy, more successful, more popular, more important, and more secure. (v) The need for Approval/Popularity: people who allow the expectations of parents, teachers, children, spouses, friends and acquaintances to control their lives, desperately always doing whatever they think will gain them more approval and/or popularity. They are driven by peer pressure, always worried what others may think of them. Unfortunately, those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it. Naturally any individual can in any circumstance or generally, be driven by any combination of driving forces. The individuals character, his conscious and subconscious motivating forces, therefore determines his or her action, inaction and adaptation within a particular social system. [8]

Of the utmost importance as the key to understanding both the spirit of a culture and the social functioning process in the culture is the fact that ideas have an emotional matrix, which is determined by the thinking and feeling of the individual's character. Thinking is not, as many assume, an exclusively intellectual act and independent of the psychological structure of the personality. This is especially so when it comes to thoughts dealing with ethical, philosophical, political, psychological or social problems. Such thoughts, in the act of thinking are greatly determined by the personality structure of the person who thinks them. This holds true for the whole of a doctrine or of a theoretical system as well as for a single concept, like love, justice, equality, sacrifice or rehabilitation. Each such concept and each doctrine has an emotional matrix and this matrix is rooted in the character structure of the individual. For example: Although the word which two people of different personality use when they speak of "rehabilitation," is the same, the meaning of the word is entirely different according to the emotional matrix in their character structure. [9]

Educational techniques constitute one of the mechanisms by which our characters, and social character was formed; as well as how our characters and social character may be transformed. [9]

Assuming the premise is right that only a fundamental change in human character can save us from a psychological and economic catastrophe -- the question arises: Is large scale characterological change possible, and if so, how can it be brought about? Erich Fromm postulates that any individual, group, family or community's human character can change and heal if the following four conditions exist in the individual, group, family or community's awareness and actions:

• I am (We are) suffering and I am (we are) aware of my (our) suffering;
  
• I (We) recognize the origin of my (our) ill-being;
  
• I (We) recognize that there is a way of overcoming my (our) ill-being;
  
• I (We) accept that in order to overcome my (our) ill-being I (we) must follow certain norms for living and change my (our) present practice of life. [9]

These four points correspond to the Four Noble Truths that form the basis of the Buddha's teaching dealing with the general condition of human existence, though not with cases of human ill-being due to specific individual or social circumstances. Freud's method of healing was essentially similar. The psychoanalysts usual first task is to help patients give up their illusions about their suffering and learn what their ill-being really consists of. The essence of psychoanalytic process is to help make patients aware of the causes of their ill-being. As a consequence of such knowledge, patients can arrive at the next step: the insight that their ill-being can be cured, provided its causes are done away with. Nothing lasting can be achieved by persons, or communities who suffer from a general ill-being and for whom a change of character is necessary, unless they change their practice of life in accordance with the change of character they want to achieve. Insight, seperated from practice remains ineffective, and is futile. [9]

Any new ideas on any issue, whether rehabilitation, learning, justice or whatever, can become powerful social functioning process evolutionary forces, if, and only to the extent to which, they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character; and in their turn tend to stabilize and intensify the new social character. Are there specific social functioning process problems and needs within our social character, which could be healed, transforming, stabilizing and intensifying our new social character towards creative morality and liberty for all? [9]



The Obedient Sado-Masochist Bureaucrat's Blueprint for Criminal Justice Policies

"If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear, or what the striped-trousered ones who rule do not want people to hear"
-- George Orwell --

Professor Kai T. Erikson, suggested in his book Wayward Puritans, that communities consider deviant criminal behaviour as an ingredient in the glue that holds the community together. The community or society positively needs unacceptable criminal behaviour as a force to unite 'us' against 'them'. Professor Erikson's theory is based on the view of crime that finds expression in one of the classic works of sociological theory, The Division of Labor in Society, by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim suggested that crime (and by extension other forms of deviation) may actually perform a needed service to society by drawing people together in a common unified posture of anger and indignation. [10]

Put differently, nothing unites a community or builds national-unity easier than a common enemy, where the 'unity' is often of superiority. Usually systematic intense devaluation of the enemy prior to action against him provides a measure of psychological justification for his brutal treatment. Once having acted against the enemy, these individuals often find it necessary to view the enemy as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character. [14]

Building national unity by drawing people together in a common unified posture of anger and indignation (at the 'criminal' enemy), is the use of political policy to redefine the meaning of the situation. In this case: what it means to be a Proudly 'New' South African. Control the manner in which a man -- in South Africa, America or wherever -- interprets his world, and you go a long way toward controlling his behaviour, because there is a propensity for people to accept definitions and interpretations of action, situations and behaviour provided to them by individuals whom they consider to be legitimate authority. That is why governments invest heavily in ideological propaganda, which constitutes the official manner of interpreting events. [14]

Additionally every situation also possesses a kind of ideology, which is called the "definition of the situation," and which is the interpretation of the meaning of the particular social occasion. It provides the perspective through which the elements of a situation gain coherence and clarity. An act viewed in one perspective may seem heinous; the same action viewed in another perspective seems fully warranted. [14]

When people accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority, although the individual performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning. Simply recall the recent actions of Ms. Lyndie England. It is this ideological abrogation to the authority that constitutes the principal cognitive basis of obedience. If, after all, the world, event, job, or the particular situation is as the authority defines and describes it, a certain set of actions follows logically. Because the individual conforms and without critical analysis accepts the authority's definition of the situation, obedient action follows willingly, often enthusiastically. [14]

Both Durkheim and Erikson propose that the failure to eliminate or reduce criminal deviance promotes social unity and solidarity. They conclude that the form -- or how, and why -- this failure occurs in a particular society can be explained by the contribution the failure makes to promoting agreement on shared beliefs and thus feelings of social solidarity. [10]

Put differently in the South African context. How and why -- the form -- the South African government fails to elimate or reduce crime and criminality, can be explained by the contribution the failure helps to promote widespread support, agreement and shared beliefs, in the nation, for: (i) a new form of social superiority and vengeance solidarity, against 'criminals', to replace 'apartheid'; and (ii) a political party unified support base for the urgency and need for government welfare programs -- big 'gravy-train' government -- to allegedly eliminate or alleviate poverty. Note the form of this failure promotes agreement, shared beliefs, social solidarity and unity predominantly against the criminals, -- such as in "Vang hulle en hang hulle" -- and not against the criminal justice policy makers. The media-savvy criminal justice policy makers seem highly adept at both alleviating their projected guilt towards the criminals, as well as building their supporter unity, such as in headlines of "Amnestie: Die ANC dink weer," Die Burger's front page headline on pre-election day, 13 April 2004! How many prisoners and prisoners family members read that headline and were emotionally blackmailed by an idea?


Does South Africa's punishment masquerading as 'rehabilitation' penological policy exist not to deter criminality, but to covertly serve our latent desire for vengeance and superiority?

Man Against Himself; By Karl Menninger [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

"We serve with humility - rehabilitated citizens are our pride"
-- Dept. of Corrections "Rehabilitation" Propaganda Poster --

"We serve in arrogant dominance -- violent career criminals are our pride and joy"
-- Futuristic (After-Civil-Warrior-Lawsuit) Dept of Corrections "Smoking Can Kill You" Label --

How much does the noted psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Menninger's observations and questions in The Crime of Punishment apply to South Africa's alleged transformation nation-building? "Does crime flourish because we need -- even secretly enjoy -- it? Does punishment exist not to deter criminality, but to serve our desire for vengeance?" In South African criminal justice 'transformation' political policy making: Does nothing succeed like failure? If so, exactly what does it say about our honesty and sincerity related to the principles of 'truth,' 'reconciliation,' 'forgiveness,' and 'transformation'? Hypocritical parasites?

Our system for controlling crime is ineffective, unjust, expensive. Prisons seem to operate with revolving doors -- the same people going in and out and in and out. Who cares?

Our inhuman reformatories and wretched prisons are jammed. They are known to be unhealthy, dangerous, immoral, indecent, crime-breeding dens of iniquity. Not everyone has smelled them, as some of us have. Not many have heard the groans and the curses. Not everyone has seen the hate and despair in a thousand blank, hollow faces. But, in a way, we all know how miserable prisons are. We want them to be that way. And they are. Who cares?

Professional and big-time criminals prosper as never before. Gambling syndicates flourish. White-collar crime may even exceed all others, but goes undetected in the majority of cases. We are all being robbed and we know who the robbers are. They live nearby. Who cares?.....

The inescapable conclusion is that society secretly wants crime, needs crime, and gains definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it? We condemn crime; we punish offenders for it; but we need it. The crime and punishment ritual is a part of our lives. We need crimes to wonder at, to enjoy vicariously, to discuss and speculate about, and to publicly deplore. We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to envy secretly, and to punish stoutly. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, they bear the burdens of our displaced guilt and punishment -- "the iniquities of us all." .........

We have to confess that there is something fascinating for us all about violence. That most crime is not violent we know but we forget.. To all of us crime seems like violence. Violence is something we abhor -- or do we? We do not always run away from it. For violence also intrigues us. It is exciting. It is dramatic. Observing it and sometimes even participating in it gives us acute pleasure... On the television and movie screens there constantly appear for our amusement scenes of fighting, slugging, beating, torturing, shooting and the like which surpass in effect anything that the newspapers can describe... Although most of us say we deplore cruelty and destructiveness, we are partially deceiving ourselves. We disown violence, ascribing the love of it to other people. But the facts speak for themselves. We do love violence, all of us, and we all feel secretly guilty for it, which is another clue to public resistance to crime-control reform. The great sin by which we all are tempted is the wish to hurt others, and this sin must be avoided if we are to live and let live......

The public has a fascination for violence, and clings tenaciously to its yen for vengeance, blind and deaf to the expense, futility, and dangerousness of the resulting penal system.... This is its crime, our crime against criminals -- and, incidentally, our crime against ourselves. For before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful and penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive constructive social attitude -- therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact.

In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us. This is the message of old religions and new psychiatries. Unless this message is heard, unless we, the people -- the man on the street, the housewife in the home -- can give up our delicious satisfactions in opportunities for vengeful retaliation on scapegoats, we cannot expect to preserve our peace, our public safety, or our mental health.

In South Africa, is our system for controlling crime innefective, unjust and expensive? Do our prisons seem to operate with revolving doors -- the same people going in and out and in and out? Who cares?

Are our reformatories inhuman and our wretched prisons jammed? Are they known to be unhealthy, dangerous, immoral, indecent, crime-breeding dens of iniquity? Have you smelled them recently, as I have? Have you heard the groans and the curses, as I have? Have you seen the hate and despair in a thousand blank, hollow faces, as I have? But, even if not, do we all know how miserable our prisons are? Do we want them to be that way? Are they? Who cares?

How far from the truth is the inescapable conclusion that South Africa secretly wants crime, and gains definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it? Do we condemn crime, punish offenders for it, but need it? Is the crime and punishment ritual a part of our lives? Do we need crimes to wonder at, to enjoy vicariously, to discuss and speculate about, and to publicly deplore? Do we need criminals to identify ourselves with, to envy secretly, and to punish stoutly? Do they do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, do they bear the burdens of our displaced guilty and punishment -- "the iniquities of us all"?

Do we disown violence, ascribing the love of it to other people? But, do the facts speak for themselves? Do we love violence, all of us, and do we all feel secretly guilty for it? Is this another clue to public resistance to crime-control reform? Is the great sin by which we all are tempted, the wish to hurt others? To avenge our hurts?

No, you say definately not, you have no wish to hurt others? Not even criminals. You are not a Lyndie England. You find no pleasure or gratification from the dehumanization of an Iraqi or South African prisoner. Not even if ordered to do so by a legitimate political authority, such as the CIA, NIA, or Boss would you hurt another; nor would you hurt another by simply doing nothing and conforming to the pressured opinions of your "struggle-capitalistic-brother" peers? You are one of South Africa's criminal justice policy dissenters, are you?



Dissent, or, Obedience and Conformity to Authority?

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View; By Stanley Milgram [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

"In this, I was like many millions of Americans. In addition, also like many millions of Americans, I was probably afraid to face the issue of Vietnam, afraid that if I learned enough about it, I would have to join those radical, far-out types who two or three years ago were saying in such lonely fashion what many middle-class people are saying now: that our policy in Vietnam is wrong, that it is callous and brutalizing to those who must implement it, that it cannot be supported by thinking or humane people and that if one comes to feel this way, he has to engage in the uncomfortable and annoying and possibly threatening posture of putting his body where his words are. In the interval since I discovered that I couldn't duck Vietnam any longer, I have tried to do my homework, read some history, examine the Administrations position, listen to it's critics and come to a stand of my own. I've come to a stand, all right. And I only regret, ..., that I did not come to it with much greater speed. For I have now gone the full route from unconcern.. to curiosity... to study.. to mild concern.. to deep concern.. to signing statements.. to genteel protest.. to marching.. to moral outrage.. to increasingly vigorous protest.. to.... civil disobedience. "
-- Robert McAfee Brown, in In Conscience, I Must Break The Law --

Obedience and conformity both refer to the abdication of personal individual initiative to an external source of authority. A series of brilliant experiments on conformity were carried out by S.E. Asch in 1951. A group of six apparent subjects were shown a line of a certain length and asked to say which of three other lines matched it. All but one of the subjects in the group had been secretly instructed beforehand to select one of the "wrong" lines on each trial or in a certain percentage of the trials. The naive subject was so placed that he heard the answers of most of the group before he had to announce his own decision. Asch found that under this form of social peer pressure a large fraction of subjects went along and conformed to the group's inaccurate opinion, rather than accept the unmistakeable evidence of their own eyes, and provoke social ostracisation. What about you? Conformist to other's peer pressured inaccurate opinions, or brutal ostracised truth teller? [14]

Social psychologist, Dr. Stanley Milgram, notes from his studies at Yale University, recorded as Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, that perhaps the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society, due to the division of labor among men, is: it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences of the action. The most fundamental lesson of the study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person and the system in it's place. Are YOU helping to keep the system in place? Why? Too Afraid to disobey or question authority by being a social engineer? Parasitism and obedience suits your social character? [14]

Obedience to authority is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the cement that binds men to systems of authority. Facts of recent history and observation in daily life suggest that for many people obedience may be a deeply ingrained behaviour tendency, indeed, a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. C.P. Snow (1961) points to its importance when he writes: "When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." [14]

In The Rebel, Albert Camus, asks "What is a rebel?" His answer: "A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion." Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs. Do you have the courage to act out your beliefs? Once were your motivating beliefs for justice, are they now for money, fame and power? How sure are you about your answer? Time and again people disvalue what they are doing but cannot muster the inner resources to translate their values into action. Do you translate your values, not only into words, but into action? You say you care about this, about that, and yet in your actions: you do nothing!? [14]

Milgram asserts that any competent manager of a destructive bureaucratic system can arrange his personnel so that only the most callous and obtuse are directly involved in violence. The greater part of the personnel can consist of men and women who, by virtue of their distance from the actual acts of brutality, will feel little strain in their performance of supportive functions. They will feel doubly absolved from responsibility. First, legitimate authority has given full warrant for their actions. Second, they have not themselves committed brutal physical acts. [14]

Finally, Milgrams experiments revealed the capacity of man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures. A substantial proportion (60 to 92%) of people do what they are told to do, just as Lyndie England did, even if they are told to hurt other people, namely, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. [14]

How often, have you pointedly refused to obey dictatorial ANC, or otherwise, authority requiring you to remain obedient while others suffered or were in pain? Are you really one of the 8%, or like Ms. England, one of the 92%?

In an article entitled The Dangers of Obedience, Harold J. Laski wrote:

"..civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain. Within the ambit of that definition, those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.

"...Our business if we desire to live a life not utterly devoid of meaning and significance, is to accept nothing which contradicts our basic experience merely because it comes to us from tradition or convention or authority. It may well be that we shall be wrong: but our self-expression is thwarted at the root unless the certainties we are asked to accept coincide with the certainties we experience. That is why the condition of freedom in any state is always a widespread and consistent skepticism of the canons upon which power insists."

Proudly South African: Unconsciously United in the Penological Pathology of Greed, Aggression, Violence & Revenge

The Individual In A Social World: Essays and Experiments; By Stanley Milgram, John Sabini, Maury Silver [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

"There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out there would be no more criminals than now. They are a blot upon any civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed."
-- Clarence Darrow, in Address to the Prisoners of Cook County Jail --

Dr. Meredith Bombar, a social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Elmira College, notes that it would be difficult intentionally to shape a more effective breeding ground for aggression than that which already exists in the average prison: "When I teach Social Psychology class, I spend a week or so going over the social/learned causes of aggression (e.g. provocation, modeling, punishment, extreme frustration, roles and social norms calling for aggression, physical discomfort, crowding, presence of guns and other objects associated with aggression, etc.). After the students have digested that, I ask them to imagine a horrible fantasy world which would put together all of these known social/environmental causes of aggression. What would it be? A typical prison." [4]

Now, consider that Dr. Bombar's general view of a prison would be the average American prison. Compared to the average American prison the causes of aggression in South African prisons make American prisons seem like kindergarden. Unconvinced? Please continue reading!

Allegedly our bureaucrats, possibly with your obedient conforming support, are legislatively designing criminal justice policies to reduce aggression, violence and crime; aren't they?

Imagine we were to ask our correctional and criminal justice administrative functionaries that instead of designing a criminal justice and correctional system to reduce and prevent crime, they had to design one that would maintain and encourage a stable and visible "class" of criminals: "What would such a criminal justice and correctional system look like?"

Think about it! Design a criminal justice and correctional system to maintain and encourage a stable and visible class of violent criminals! Create career criminals as a government taxpayer GDP 'product'!

This was precisely the question posed to graduate students already working in the fields of corrections as probation officers, prison guards, and counselors, in a seminar titled "The Philosophy of Punishment and Rehabilitation," at The American University in Washington, D.C. some years ago. Briefly, here is a sample of their proposals:

1. It would be helpful to have laws on the books against consensual crimes: drug use, prostitution and gambling -- laws that prohibit acts that have no unwilling victim. This would make many people "criminals", helpful for prison overcrowding (i.e. aggression, violence, etc), and would increase their need to engage in secondary crime.
   

2. It would be good to give police, prosecutors, and judges broad discretion to decide who got arrested, who got charged, and who got sentenced to prison. This would mean that almost anyone who got as far as prison would know of others who committed the same crime but who either were not arrested or were not charged or were not sentenced to prison. This would assure us that a good proportion of the prison population would experience their confinement as arbitrary and unjust and thus respond with rage, which would make them more "antisocial," rather than respond with remorse, which would make them feel more bound by social norms.
   

3. The prison experience should be not only painful but also demeaning. The pain of loss of liberty might deter future crime, but demeaning and emasculating a prisoner by placing them in an enforced childhood characterized by no privacy and no control over over their time and actions, as well as by the constant threat of rape or assault, is sure to overcome the deterrent effect by weakening whatever capacities a prisoner had for self-control. Indeed, by humiliating and brutalizing prisoners we can be sure to increase their potential for aggressive violence.
   

4. It goes almost without saying that prisoners should neither be trained in a marketable skill nor provided with a job after release. Of course their prison records should stand as a perpetual stigma to discourage employers from hiring them. Otherwise, they might be tempted to become law abiding citizens and NOT to return to crime after release.
   

5. The ex-offenders's sense that they will always be different from "decent citizens," that they can never finally settle their debt to society, should be reinforced as often as possible, as stigmatized individuals for the rest of their lives.

In short, asked to design a system that would maintain and encourage the existence of a stable and visible "class of criminals", they "constructed" the American criminal justice system. [5]

Having first-hand experience, observation and study opportunities, in both the American (Californian) and South African criminal justice systems, I can honestly say, the current South African criminal justice system's intentional or unintentional design far surpasses with extraordinarily efficiency the American system -- at not only maintaining, but seriously encouraging the existence of a growing visible class of criminals, especially violent and aggressive one's.

[SNIP]

Does punishment exist not to deter criminality, but to serve our and YOUR desire for vengeance?

Other similar and worse examples of abysmal differences in California and South African prisons, include a prisoners rights to: nutritious meals; medical treatment; just administrative action; spiritual practices; information on prison structural procedures: complaints, requests, rules & regulations, etc; law library access to research your defense while awaiting trial or for appeal; legal confidential mail to courts and attorneys; Appeal of Requests and complaints procedures; telephone privileges; Unlock/Program/Exercise Time, etc.

There is more: The Official legislative focus of California's prison's is? Punishment! Not even with all the efficient administrative effort to provide for prisoners real rights towards rehabilitation, do they consider their prison policy to be focussed on rehabilitation!

Ludicrously, fraudulently and hypocritically, the alleged Official legislative focus of South Africa's prisons is? Rehabilitation!



Interactive Action-Oriented Living Laboratory Mentoring Voluntary Offer:

A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial; By H.L. Mencken [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

"I believe in only one thing: Liberty; but I do not believe in Liberty enough to want to force it on anyone"
-- H.L. Mencken --

In the fourteen months I spent in George Correctional Services prison, which cost the South African taxpayers approximately R 42,500.00; no effort whatsoever was made by Corrections authorities to 'rehabilitate' me! Not once! Quite the opposite: Virtually every single effort, I made to "rehabilitate" myself, such as to get access to reading and study material, request access to quiet place to study, meditate and read, etc., etc., was obstructed, denied, vilified, denigrated, condemned, refused, or ignored repeatedly, especially by management. Dozens of repeated requests to management to please officially define their interpretation and meaning of 'rehabilitation' were ignored. The Magistrate obediently remained silent, possibly enjoying his revenge?

In March 2003, I offered and requested -- in writing, in my Correctional Case File -- that Department of Corrections 'Rehabilitation' Management Authorities, allow me to use my skills, training and experience with interactive action-oriented learning techniques and mentoring principles to benefit the Department and prisoners, by sharing with interested prisoners: - their rights as per the Constitution; - decision making skills; - attack-encounter aggression-release group therapy skills, etc., etc; with the ultimate goal of the prisoners beginning to do what all responsible, law-abiding citizens do -- register with the political party of their choice, vote, organize, demonstrate, agitate, demand control of their destinies!

In other words to create a miniature, less sophisticated version of Charlie Houston's Law School at Howard University: a small little living laboratory where civil-prisoner-rehabilitation-rights law could be invented by teamwork; to share via action-oriented learning what I had learnt from among others: -- former Director of Treatment at Trenton Maximum Security Prison, New Jersey, criminologist and psychologist professor: Dr. Richard Korn, my former mentor and friend; -- Delancey Street Foundation's Institute of Social Renewal Training Program; -- Alameda County Prisoner Mentor Training Program; etc.

Briefly, I'll elaborate a little on the Social Expert reciprocity educational theory and ideas I would have shared and practiced in this correctional living laboratory where civil-prisoner-rehabilitation-rights law (prisoner active-oriented liberty) might've been invented by teamwork:


HOW: Reciprocity: Alternative Models of the Social Correctional Expert

Prof. Richard Korn, taught criminology and psychology at Univ. of California, Berkeley and John Jay College of Criminology, New York. For many years he worked as an expert witness prison investigator for Amnesty International, testifying in numerous extraordinary trials, such as the Soledad Brothers, San Quentin Aryan Brotherhood, and Political Prisoner trials. He helped to co-found Delancey Street, and was the co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Criminal Justice, which is renowned for it's criminal justice reform workshops in eight American states. In his workshops, using psychodrama, and brutal honesty truth-telling techniques, he brought together victims of crime, prisoners, legislators, judges, prosecutors, prison guards, and police, for ten day intensive workshops, from which many criminal justice reforms emanated. He was invited by the Swedish government to work in mental institutions in Sweden, sharing his theoretical reciprocity training. In 1998, he contacted the South African government, offering to hold such criminal justice workshops in South Africa, possibly at Robben Island, to support it to be a Living University Museum, rather than simply a museum. He was entirely ignored.

In Images of Criminality and Models of the Correctional Process, criminologist and psychologist, Dr. Richard Korn, Ph.D., details three predominant models of the Social Correctional Expert. Excerpts of what he had to say:

Expert as OPERATOR
Action of Expert: Does TO the client what the client cannot do
Role of Client: Passivity: Client as OBJECT
Relational aspects: Dominance-submission
Typical statuses: Surgeon - body of patient
Experts Skills Are: Magical, uncommunicable; forbidden to client

Expert as PRESCRIBER
Action of Expert: Does FOR the client what the client cannot do for himself
Role of Client: Dependency: Client as DEPENDENT
Relational aspects: Superiority-inferiority
Typical statuses: Leader-follower / Parent-child
Experts Skills Are: Translated only into directives

Expert as CO-LEARNER
Action of Expert: Does WITH the client what the client can ultimately do for himself
Role of Client: Reciprocity: Client as COLLEAGUE
Relational aspects: Equality Role-exchange
Typical statuses: Friends / Brothers
Experts Skills Are: Fully shared and transparent

We are dealing at bottom with the fateful consequences of three different attitudes toward the Other. We can do things to him, in which case he becomes an Object. We can do things for him, in which case he becomes a Dependent. We can do things with him, in which case he has the opportunity to become an Agent. Whatever the content or intent of the action, it is the relationship between the actors that is crucial -- and that defines the difference between domination (to him), dependency (for him) and self-realization (with him) in the political, economic and social realms, as well as in the interpersonal.

It is at least an arguable proposition that many of our social problems are excacerbated by the decrease of situations enabling reciprocity on a give-and-get equal basis with our fellow men. It is also arguable that the role of patient, in its passivity, dependency and lack of mutuality, contributes to the perpetuation of the illness. Studies of institutional adjustment, whether in the prison, the hospital or the clinic suggest that situations which limit the possibilities of reciprocity between the cared-for and the caring contribute powerfully to the continuance of the need for care. It may well be that the status of patient is half the disease....

The Misapplication of the Medical Model to the Correctional Situation

The use of "treatment" to denote any combination of penal procedures is now so commonplace that its validity is rarely questioned. The usage itself -- in common with other examples of what might be called the sentimental nomenclature of corrections -- reflects a common confusion between aspiration and consequences... By achieving the support of the medical and paramedical professions, the correctional system succeeded in co-opting the cooperation of virtually the only social agents likely to possess the insight required to see through the [Operator Model of correctional therapeutic treatment] deception, and the prestige required to effectively counteract it. Even the psychiatrists, whose altered medical model of the therapist-as-liberator might better have armed them against the deception, were, by and large, uncritical of the basic contradiction. Indeed, some of the most vehement psychiatric critics of correction, rather than attacking the operator model as a violation of fundamental psychiatric tenets, have given the most powerful endorsement of it. I refer to those whose major criticism of the legal-criminal process and the penal establishment is that they, the psychiatrists, have not been given the power to control it...

Unfortunately (or fortunately) the prisoners were not similarly deceived. They are well aware that they are not being treated as helpless incompetents. They are equally aware that society's major interest in their "condition" is not in the damage it may inflict on them, the prisoners, but rather in the danger it may pose for the community. They did not ask for treatment, as other "patients" do -- nor do they have any reason to be confident in it, being well aware that between 30 and 70% of their fellow patients repeatedly "relapse". Faced with the choice between gaining release by surrendering their own autonomy and risking further punishment while preserving it, they have in impressively large numbers preferred to be viewed as bad rather than mad. Which one of us would not have made the same choice?

Thus the medical model of correction produced its most paradoxical dillema of all. Far from eliciting the respect and cooperation of those it "sought" to help, it has provoked against itself the most powerful antagonist of all: the determination of the human spirit to maintain its own integrity at any cost.

The Mutual Help Model: Expert Citizen and Offender as Co-Participants

The realization that the citizen and the offender are, in the deepest senses, mutually responsible for their problems with each other has led some to believe that these problems can be solved only in the same context of mutuality. One of the most effective proponents of this view, Professor Charles Slack, has set down his conception of the necessary conditions for this result. Our aim, he suggests, must be "to utilize the creative forces of stigmatized individuals as a means to their own development". To that end, he asserts, we must recognize the following principles:

1. The stigmatized individual is the world's foremost authority on himself.
   

2. If he has a goal outside of himself, toward which he is committed, his rehabilitation will become a natural by-product of the success or failure in the achievement of that goal.
   

3. "Planning for" a stigmatized individual tends to keep him in his (stigmatized) role. Making his own plans and experiencing the consequences of his behaviour is vital to any change which will take place in him.
   

4. He helps himself as he helps others; he changes himself as he attempts to change others, and he teaches himself as he teaches others. The professional operator and prescriber role relationship tends to preclude change because it prevents the stigmatized individual from being the active participant.
   

5. Change in the stigmatized individual is facilitated if professional or non-stigmatized people associated with him refrain from engaging in activities which cannot also be done by the stigmatized individual. In working with probation officers, for example, it would be better not to play the role of probation officer, since this role is one a probationer can never play, no matter how he tries...

The sociologist Simmel has suggested that freedom is not a condition, which -- once achieved may be thought of as finally secured: freedom consists in an endless process of liberation. Like insight, like thought itself, it requires a problem to confront, a difficulty to overcome, and latitude to develop alternatives through which obstacles may be surmounted. [6]

Or as Viehmann, the director of 'The Bridge,' an exceptional transitional housing program for homeless families in Phoenix, Arizona, explains their embodiment of the fundamental secret of turning lives around: it has to happen through one-on-one listening to people, listening to them long enough to understand what they really need. Another premise that recurs: You can't rebuild people's lives on an assembly line. The Bridge use the word 'coach' consciously: A coach shows people how to do a job and doesn't do it for them. A coach helps people to determine their potential and then lets them reach for their goals on their own. It's all aimed at helping the individual identify and work out the problems that got them on the street in the first place. [12]



WHY: Building Psychic Freedom Muscles: Regular and safe draining off of Rage, Anger & Hopelessness:

When a psychiatrist examines many prisoners, writes Seymour Halleck in Psychiatry and the Dilemmas of Crime, he soon discovers how important in the genesis of the criminal outbreak is the offenders previous sense of helplessness and hopelessness. All of us suffer more or less from infringement of our personal freedom. We do not want others to push us around, to control us, to dominate us. No one truly has complete freedom. But restriction irks us. [10]

The offender feels this way, too. He does not want to be pushed around, controlled, or dominated. And because he often feels that he is thus oppressed (and actually is) and because he does lack facility in improving his situation without violence, he suffers more intensely from feelings of helplessness. [10]

The need to deny something in oneself, is frequently an underlying motive for certain odd behaviour -- even up to and including crime. For example: Most sex crimes are committed by undersexed rather than oversexed individuals, often undersized rather than oversized, and impelled less by lust than by a need for reassurance regarding an impaired masculinity. The unconscious fear of women goards some men with a compulsive urge to conquer, humiliate, hurt, or render powerless some available sample of womanhood. [10]

Prof. Karl Menningers colleague, Bruno Bettelheim, thought that we do not properly educate our youth to deal with their violent urges. He reminds us that nothing fascinated our forefathers more. The Iliad is a poem of violence. Much of the Bible is a record of violence. Our penal system and many methods of child-rearing express violence -- "violence to suppress violence." And, he concludes in the article Violence: A Neglected Mode of Behaviour: "We shall not be able to deal intelligently with violence unless we are first ready to see it as part of human nature, and then we shall come to realize the chances of discharging violent tendences are now so severely curtailed that their regular and safe draining-off is not possible anymore." [10]

Again: "We shall not be able to deal intelligently with violence unless we are first ready to see it as part of human nature, and then we shall come to realize the chances of discharging violent tendences are now so severely curtailed that their regular and safe draining-off is not possible anymore."

How many of the Department of Corrections 'Rehabilitation programs' provide for the opportunity to discharge violent tendencies verbally as a means of safe draining off, by offering attack-therapy-encounter group sessions, as re-educative tools for individuals to: - develop psychic muscles, increase insight, awareness and self-reliance; - encourage obscene and hysterical outpourings of laughter, tears, rage and love, to get bottled up feelings of hostility out into the open to be truly forgiven and forgotten?

California: San Francisco: Delancey Street Foundation, started by John Maher in the early 1970's is a San Francisco based interracial community of ex-addicts and ex-convicts who are making it on their own: they operate their own businesses (plumbing, construction, restaurant, auto-repair); they have their own high school, vocational college, and credit union; they own residential and commercial real estate worth ten (two in 1980) million dollars in the most exclusive sections of San Francisco. Incredibly, John Maher built this self fueling power base in just four years, independent of federal aid, welfare, professional social workers, and large foundation funds. [7]

Three times a week, for 3 to 4 hours all Delancey Street residents participate in basic leaderless, attack-encounter group therapy sessions, called 'Games'. Where on the outside, a waitor might harbour murderous thoughts about the maitre d' for weeks on end, about a small slight, with no outlet for his feelings; in Delancey Street, he can vomit out all his animosities and frustrations in the Game, and find freedom from them. Additionally he can get brutally honest feedback and ideas related to his thoughts and gain valuable insight into his feelings of helplessness and rage. He gains dozens of alternative ideas to deal with his problem, from others who have had the same problem. He learns to confront his problem, verbally, face-to-face and nonviolently. The Game is what makes Delancey Street run, where it conducts its business, where its residents are re-educated; what's kept it's drug-addicts clean, and what keeps physical violence out of their lives.[7]


WHO: Mutual Help Destiny Control Colleagues: A Guide for Peaceful Revolution in South Africa:

How many Department of Corrections Social Worker Rehabilitation experts providing Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Anger Management, etc. programs are aware of exactly how attentive and seriously the average addictive personality ex-convict, ex-addict, or ex-alcoholic listens to the Correctional or Social Expert's lectures about their specific problem?

A young woman who had been an alcoholic since fifteen: "When the family told me, I turned off. When the priest told me, I thought, 'What does he know?' When the doctor told me, I didn't hear. But when a room full of alkies who had been through the same kind of hell, and worse, told me, "You're an alcoholic," there was just no way I could kid myself any longer." Delancey Street practices it's own version of AA's (Alcoholics Anonymous) and Synanon's revolutionary method, of freeing the addictive personality -- the discovery that ex-patients make the best doctors. [7]

In John Maher of Delancey Street: A Guide for Peaceful Revolution in America, Grover Sales interviews Delancey Street resident's, founders, squares, etc:

Ron Coombs, an ex-addict, ex-criminal and former resident:

"In Games, they (other residents) encourage you to deal with your mistakes, telling me that if I could toughen this one out, handle this humiliation, I would come up stronger, better able to make right decisions, and if the decision is wrong, you learn that, too. You run from the problem, you don't learn from it... What we do here is raise people up, make them stronger, so that when someone on the outside looks down on you as an ex-con, you say, "Fine," and go down the street someplace else looking for work, it doesn't hurt. After a few years of living clean, you get these feelings, get tied in with these people....

Of course, John Maher is behind all this. They held these seminars every morning, where someone in the house would run it down about what Delancey was doing, for about an hour, except when John did it, once or twice a week, and then it would run three hours. First time I heard John, I thought, "Jesus, they got me in here with a bunch of commies!" The second time he spoke I thought I was hearing Martin Luther King. And his seminars would start to build unity. He told us where the Foundation was going; we'd ask him questions. He got rid of a lot of my prejudices about blacks, and my ignorance, the labels they put on people. John has a way of carrying everyone in the room. He will say something in three hours to hit all three hundred people, give them something to work on. He speaks to an audience. He can talk about the prejudiced honkies, the prejudiced blacks, the guilt people carry around. He caroms everyone, hits them with something, and when he walks out, he leaves them thinking about themselves and their actions, what they really want to do with their lives, and if their lives are kind of fucked up, how they can change it.

The reason John gets so much respect is that everyone knows he is not asking you to do anything he doesn't do himself. I got so much trust in that man, that he can ask me to do anyting, I wouldn't even question it, and I never felt that way about anyone. John can relate to you, put you through changes, because he's been there himself, it's not something he's read in a book.

John Maher, ex-criminal, ex-addict, Delancey Street Founder:

"When you're incompetent, and got no education," says John Maher, "you can be either one of two things: you can be a bum, or a great social leader. I failed as a bum, so I had no options." He is only half joking, for Maher at thirty-five, a former addict and convict, is today the cutting edge of the most exciting social experiment in America.

"Quickly we find that the most virilent white racists can begin to respect blacks who stand up for themselves, and that when blacks meet really tough whites for the first time, instead of middle-class social worker lames, a mutual respect builds to where they can work together. The toughest gangsters are verbally more racist when they come here, but the tougher they are, the more quickly they will grant respect to a member of another ethnic group who behaves in a fashion acceptable to their code.

"So the toughest whites and blacks can very quickly integrate and work together. It's the weaklings, the whiners, the ones who need their own group around them to support their deflated egos who are the slowest to integrate. In Games a racist of any colour is talked down to, laughed at, and maybe yelled at from time to time. We find it silly. How can some black dope peddler come in here, selling heroin to black children to keep them enslaved for the benefit of the landlords and police structure, actually get up and rail at the white oppressor? He is the fucking oppressor! We recognize that racist babble and drug use are merely the symptomology of the oppressed, therefore not great crimes. We urge our blacks not to get hung up on past injustices, but to ask, "What do we want for our children?" We encourage blacks to look to the future, not to whine, "You honkies owe me four hundred years back wages."

Here we teach people that labor and capital in this country was written on the backs of black slaves, white miners, and Chinese coolies, and that there really is no difference between them when it comes to the intention of the exploiters. Once our people grasp this essential truth, they are no longer children to be manipulated and tricked off against each other by the establishment, but can begin to do what all responsible, law-abiding citizens do -- register with the political party of their choice, vote, organize, demonstrate, agitate, demand control of their destinies -- and throw the bums out! [7]

The Department of Corrections response to my offer and request to create and setup a small little living laboratory where civil-prisoner-rehabilitation-rights law (prisoner liberty) could be invented by teamwork; to help prisoners deal nonviolentely with their aggression, rage and hopelessness problems? I was publically labelled "sick in the head," to staff and prisoners, by no less than the Southern Cape Correctional Area Commissioner: Mr. N. Breakfast: YOUR Correctional Expert on Rehabilitation!

On 10 March 2004, I submitted a letter, via the G365 Prisoners Complaints Book, to the Regional Commissioner, Correctional Services, Western Cape, c/o and via: Mr. N. Breakfast, Area Commissioner, S. Cape, cc'd to Minister B.M. Skosana, requesting an apology, titled, "Current Alternatives: Financial Liability or Responsible Apology: Personal Civil Litigation against Department of Corrections for Financial Damages Compensation; or Respective Corrections Management Authorities accept cognitive behavioural moral personal responsibility for their actions of delict, by way of official written apology, hopefully sincerely."

As of 11 June 2004, I have received no response, nor any apology whatsoever.

Perhaps once the Department of Corrections attorneys find themselves faced with a massive multi-million Rand class-action lawsuit for fraud and theft damages from prisoners and taxpayers, they may be more enthusiastic to demand that Corrections Management act as rehabilitators, serving with humility, demonstrating their pride in a citizens rehabilitation, by being personally responsible, accountable and sincerely apologetic? Until them, it seems, they are more than happy to spend taxpayer funds on 'rehabilitation' propaganda, denying prisoners real rehabilitation efforts, while allowing Corrections Management staff to act fraudulently, corruptly, abusively, and vindictively, by personally avoiding any and all responsibility, accountability and sincerity.



Conclusion: Your Crime against Criminals and Yourselves

The Essential Lenny Bruce; By John Cohen Ed [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

"In the final analysis, once the physical needs of life are satisfied, the rest of life is a search for meaning. That meaning may be found in family, religion, materialism, power, fame, mysticism, asceticism, romance, sex, music, art, work or any number of pursuits, but if history teaches anything, it is that no religion or idea, and certainly no political system, yet holds the final answer. The greatest tragedies and atrocities in man's history are found when one man or group has tried to force his religion or ideas about the meaning of life on others who are "too blind to see the truth." In my judgment, Truth, with a capital "T", needs no might to make it right. Executing the Social Contract must always be an act of voluntary persuasion because forcing someone to join would violate the first premise of the Social Contract and destroy it in the process. A resort to might is a confession that Truth has not yet been found, for when it is, if it is, it will be plain for all to see. So long as there are disagreements about the meaning of life, there must be the opportunity to explore the disagreements and search for the "Truth." The Social Contract is the framework for that search, not the answer. No more. No less. "
-- Garry Gerrard, in The New Social Contract: Beyond Liberal Democracy --

"In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.... Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust.... Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment. Up to now this identification was never really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him.... The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery... In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers within itself -- a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist."
-- Albert Camus, in The Rebel --

As I said, "I might, or might not know any more than you do......" Possibly after sifting this brief essay through your mental strainer you may think I don't make any sense, or unlike US Supreme Court Justices, you may be one of those kinds of people who don't consider ideas from chimneysweeps or criminals, even if they sound right to you. Or you may not have the courage to speak out your thoughts, ideas and beliefs, disvalueing what you are doing, but unable to muster the inner resources to translate your values into action? Or you may simply now prefer your new status of living on the right side of town, to your former struggle credentials?

Do YOU prefer obedience to government double-speak, operating as a fraudulent boomerang? Do you consider the implications of a massive fraudulent boomerang political policy disturbing? Only if you couldn't feed off it like the parasite you are? Would you prefer to remain in denial, surrendering yourself to obedient deliberate indifference and Proudly South African national unity? If the South African government and public continue your fascination for violence and hypocrisy, clinging tenaciously to your yen for vengeance and it's underlying 'Proudly South African' psychological motivations, you truly are blind and deaf to the expense, futility, and dangerousness to yourselves and South Africa, of the resulting penal system. Who cares?

This White Kaffir Bitch does! Why do I say it thus? Two reasons, best explained by social experts:

Firstly, the social satirist Lenny Bruce might have said:

"Are there any niggers here tonight?" 'What did s/he say?' Are there any niggers here tonight?" Jesus Christ! Is that cruel or what? Does she have to go that low for laughs?...Are there any niggers here tonight? I know that one nigger who works here, I see him back there. Oh, theres two niggers, customers, and, ah, aha! Between those two niggers sits one kike -- man, thank God for the kike! Uh, two kikes. That's two kikes, and three niggers, and one spic. One mick...

The point? That the word's suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. If President Kennedy got on television and said, "Tonight I'd like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet," and he yelled "niggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggernigger" at every nigger he saw, "boogeyboogeyboogeyboogey, niggerniggerniggernigger" till nigger didn't mean anything any more, till nigger lost it's meaning -- you'd never make any four-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school.[10]

[SNIP]

People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society. Not so much because many occupations would not permit a loving, sincerely honest attitude, instead of public relations polite pretentiousness, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself succesfully against it.

Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. The direction of such changes is dealt with in more detail in The Sane Society.

Briefly, our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and more and consuming more and more, as purposes in themselves, included in our economic growth output data figures. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton -- well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. It if is true, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not "preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man. [11]


POSTSCRIPT:

John Maher of Delancey Street: A guide to peaceful revolution in America; By Grover Sales [*Amazon*] “Delancey Street is an incredible mixture of pure idealism and hard practicality. It is the best and the most successful [criminal rehabilitation] organization I have studied in the world” — Dr. Karl Menninger

On January 31, 2003, during court proceedings in George Magistrates Court, the Author was convicted of Contempt in Facie Curiae (In The Face Of the Court), by Magistrate ADS Meyer, for publically, disobeying authority and calling Prosecutor Y. Sipoyo a "Black Kaffir Bitch," -- with very, very good legal, moral and psychological reasons, (See Appeal to the Cape Provincial Division High Court Reference Number 16/04) -- and loudly saying "Fuck You" to Magistrate Meyer approximately seven times. Magistrate Meyer summarily sentenced the author to three counts of imprisonment of 3 months, 3 months and 6 months respectively, running consecutively, totalling one year. While serving time at George Correctional Services Prison, the author came across numerous other cases, where individuals convicted of murder (stabbing a man to death for refusing to provide a cigarette to a teenager), attempted murder, and assault, received prison sentences totalling less than 12 months! Verbally swearing in court, with no physical violence whatsoever, and for very good reasons is a greater offence than murdering a man, by repeatedly stabbing him to death with malicious, vicious physical violence, and a monumentally pathetic reason? A criminal justice recipe for rage, anger and fury at such monstrous disparity in sentencing? I'd say so. Neither of the two prisoners who assaulted the author were ever charged, or even reprimanded by Correctional Authorities: Both were released early on parole. One was returned a few weeks later, drunk from a tavern. The other one was released early (Feb 2004) by the Parole Board. One month later (March) she was re-arrested for murder (beating a 70 year old lady to death with a spade, for money for alcohol and drugs). Perhaps Incarcerations Consequences on her Human Development and Capital were that she was "rehabilitated" and learnt a special Correctional form of compassion, forgiveness and gained insight into her rage, helplessness and drug addiction, before the Parole Board released her to murder the elderly in the community of Mosselbay? Or what did she learn in the George Correctional Services Women Prison's 'Rehabilitation' programs? Perhaps, before she embarked on her own murder endeavour, driven by her own drug addiction, she remembered how on 29 September 2003, in George Correctional Services Women's Prison, seven juvenile female prisoners high on marijuana and mandrax spent hours torturing and assaulting a fellow juvenile woman prisoner by among other things: stuffing her mouth with floor polish, forcing her to undress and dance naked for them, burning her with a hot iron, repeatedly beating and assaulting her with metal objects and a broken sharp aluminium broom handle, sodomizing her and sexually assaulting her, until the dormitory cell was covered with blood. Not much different or less disturbing than Ms. Lyndie England's behaviour! Ms. England actions were considered disgusting to an enemy in the process of war, and made the worlds front pages. South Africa's abusers were simply having a bit of South African prisoner orgasmic fun, and their fun didn't even make contact with the local newspaper! Perhaps she remembered how the entire assault episode involved a party of individuals experiencing acute pleasure, entertainment and power in their violent and dehumanizing behaviour to a scapegoat, so much so, they spoke and laughed about it publically for days and weeks afterwards! Who knows? Do you have any idea how much violence, abuse and aggression is glorified and enjoyed by prisoners in South African prisons? Do you care in the slightest?

Are you still pretending, like a blood-sucking parasite, that you do not KNOW why ex-prisoners turn to crime? How long can you honestly act as if you do not know that our prison system is a major SOURCE of crime? Does the Department of Corrections spend an inordinate amount of funds on hypocritically informing taxpayers via public relations propaganda about its alleged offical 'rehabilitation' policy and programs? Has the Department of Corrections legally defined 'rehabilitation', or is it conveniently one of those Orwellian double-speak smoke and mirrors concepts which confuse, both it's employees, taxpayer funders and prisoner clients? Are there specific social functioning process problems and needs within our social character, which could be healed, transforming, stabilizing and intensifying our new social character towards creative morality and liberty for all?

In doubt? Try an intensive action-oriented Dept. of Corrections 'Rehabilitation' learning course, by getting yourself sentenced to one year in prison incognito, so you can learn the real prison procedure's and tactics, so you can learn the real difference between what the laws say and mean, and how they are applied. Perhaps thereafter your avowed aim may be to eliminate the abysmal difference, by ending your career as a parasite in exchange for a social engineer.

[1] Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education, the epochal Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation, and of Black America's struggle for equality, by Richard Kluger, 1975.

[2] Adding It Up: The Economic Impact of Incarceration On Individuals, Families, and Communities, by Harold Watts, Columbia University and The Urban Institute; and Demetra Smith Nightingale, The Urban Institute.

[3] Backfire: When Incarceration Increases Crime, by Todd R. Clear, Ph.D., Rutgers University

[4] The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition by Lee Griffith, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993)

[5] ... And the Poor Get Prison: Economic Bias in American Criminal Justice, (1995) by Jeffrey Reiman, William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy at The American University in Washington, DC and author of In Defense of Political Philosophy, Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy

[6] The Private Citizen, the Social Expert and the Social Problem, by Richard Korn, in MASS SOCIETY IN CRISES by Rosenberg, Gerver and Howton (eds.) New York: Macmillan, 1964.

[7] John Maher of Delancey Street: A Guide for Peaceful Revolution in America, (1976) by Grover Sales, 1976.

[8] The Purpose Driven Life: What On Earth Am I Here For?, by Rick Warren

[9] To Have Or To Be, by Erich Fromm

[10] The Essential Lenny Bruce, by John Cohen, Ed.

[11] The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm

[12] Reinvesting in America: The Grassroots Movements That Are Feeding the Hungry, Housing the Homeless, and Putting Americans Back to Work, by Robin Garr

[13] Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy/From Death Camp to Existentialism, by Viktor E. Frankl

[14] Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram

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