Letters to the Editor
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Briana Waters Innocence Or Guilt...
...does not change the fact that law enforcement in this country is completely out of control. From street cops to prison guards, from prosecutors to judges, the whole system is rotting. It has become a playground for morally and materially corrupt miscreants who themselves, in too many cases, belong behind bars.
But this is an older story than you might think. William Kunstler said a year a two before his death in '95 that he was gravely concerned about justice in America. "Prosecutors have become arrogant and corrupt," he said. "It's a serious problem, and I know for a fact it's going to get much worse." Both the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Chicago Tribune featured massive, multi-part, front-page series investigating prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in the 90s, not only in their respective regions but in the country as a whole. What their journalists discovered Should raise the hair on the back of any decent person's head, and those reports were published more than a decade ago. Since then almost nothing has been done, so the problem is vastly worse.
A few years back Salon published an essay by a man who taught creative writing to a class of prison inmates in Illinois. When the program was threatened by budget cuts, he told his class he'd fight for them. They warned him not to, matter-of-factly telling him that a couple of kilos of cocaine would suddenly appear in his bedroom closet and he'd end up right alongside them in prison. That is chilling, to put it mildly.
The Augean Stables of law enforcement need to be cleaned, and the sooner the better. If you doubt me, just go to YouTube and run a search on "police abuse." And prepare to be horrified.