June 3, 1991 - El Paso Herald-Post

Thinkers address 'justice as a healing notion'

Justice as a healing notion, restorative dialogue and humanizing tool for bringing humankind together was the keystone idea the 5th International Conference on Prison Abolition (ICOPA-V) addressed in Bloomington, Ind., two weeks ago.

It was a gathering of thinkers, penal experts, criminal justice professors, administrators, poets, religious, ex-offenders, philophers and persons who care about the expanding prison population which is reaching near-genocidic proportions when one sees just certain ethnic communities of color are being decimated by criminal justice systems worldwide.

One fourth of the African-American U.S. population's young men between the ages of 21 through 29 are ensnared by the criminal justice system, and within some Native American tribes the figure is said to be much higher.

The USA is perhaps No. 1 - Numero Uno - in the world in regards the number of prisoners caged up in our ever-expanding system, and that is an honor which does us little good.

We have surpassed the USSR, South Africa and other nations in the warehousing and mass-production of felons, and we as a nation see to be on a warpath against peoples of color and lower incomes.

ICOPA-V participants came from many corners of the globe, and there was a vertible rainbow of human hues discussing the pressing need for a greater notion of our mutual humanity, for the actual empowerment of peoples - as opposed to further dispossession of people while permitting institutional and governmental agencies to aggrandize more power and tools with which to lay further havoc upon individuals and communities.

Such ideas were addressed by activists, professionals and concerned citizens of diverse lands - from Canada to the USA, Costa Rica, USSR, Norway, Finland and Uganda.

Many of the participants have been laboring at finding ways to abolish the punitive and dehumanizing prison industry for many years, and they have the kind of vigor and vision which once fueled the movement to abolish slavery in our land.

Prisons exist simply because we have not yet learned how to live civilly with one another, because the powerful and elite have not yet learned how to share the globe with the rest of humankind.

The earth does not really belong to any one people or person, nor to those few who have usurped its resoures. If there is truly a Creator, perhaps we are all but caretakers of this lovely planet, and as such responsible for keeping it green and lovely.

The power motives which have kept the wealthy in power and the poor in shackles need to be transformed so that meaningful, creative and positive alternatives can be implemented.

Rev. Kathy Lancaster spoke of restorative justice; Art Solomon, a Native American spiritual adviser from Canada, sang of a life-giving struggle to cleanse the land and humankind of the spiritual pollution which is slowly and surely killing life; and poet Delbert Tibbs beautified the moment whth his caring understanding of our painful road toward a humanizing realization. Groups like the National Interreligious Task Force on Criminal Justice interacted with peace and justice organizations in addressing the barbariy of death penalties, most especially in the last years of the 20th Century.

The healing songs of Native America embraced the many other Americas present there, and Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latinos responded...(continues next week).