DNA's Forever Imprisonment
by Odin odin@aflx.com — Read all 3,869 poems by Odin odin@aflx.com
What is forgiveness for those whose suffering of injustice will forever stamp them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/us/2-convicted-in-1983-north-carolina-murder-freed-after-dna-tests.html29039964
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
DNA’s Forever Imprisonment
by Odin Roark
Technology has released them
Prisons are that much less crowded,
The streets now with lost ones,
Wandering after decades of incarceration,
Looking for…
Blame is not the game,
Science is both culprit and savior,
Bringing truth to bear,
To prove yesterday’s judicial tactics insufficient,
To ask our forgiveness,
To collectively be aware.
Men and women free now,
Their new kind of imprisonment ahead,
The shackles of resistance,
Of ignorance,
Of prejudice,
Of habitual thinking.
A society of collective tapestry,
Whose needle,
Stitch,
And finished fabric of time,
Finds itself pressed to adjust,
Think different,
See these falsely convicted prisoners,
As merely a you,
A me,
A next door neighbor,
A mistake with revelatory consequence,
The difference being chance.
How sad,
The years lost,
The memories confined to a cell,
The living that was held in check,
The contribution we’ll never know.
Yet…
All would agree,
It does pay to be in the right place
At the right time,
Even as such luxury
May not offer lessons learned
As well as those experienced
By an act of forgiveness.
There is the managing of acceptance,
Usually less by the exonerated,
Than by us. Reminding us,
How locked we often remain
In our prejudiced inability,
Unwilling to embrace change.
.
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For as long as courts have been held, eyewitness accounts have always served to determine guilt. Now, we are on the verge of finding out that eyewitness accounts are more often wrong than right; that people see what they want to see and not what they actually saw, if they saw anything at all.
But you go further than that. You get the heart of our criminal/prison/segregated industrial enterprise that is now mostly profit-making. While prisoners who have served their time are supposed to free, most employers will no longer hire anyone with a criminal record, apartments cannot be rented to anyone with a criminal record, and houses can't be sold to anyone with a criminal record. So how is someone (even someone who has suffered under a wrong conviction) to get ahead in this world and not be dependent upon family and friends just to exist?
Like soldiers come home from war with psychological impairment, we need to come up with a way to provide the correct psychological counseling and avenues to gainful employment (with forgiveness, not prejudice) so that these individuals can become a part of society again and not just trash. What if that had happened to Nelson Mandela? What would South Africa be like?
Ron