OPENING TO CHAPTER ELEVEN

the exclusion illusion & the power of connection

"It is inclusivity that brings security - belonging, not belongings."
-JEREMY RIFKIN

In the novel The Samurai's Garden, Sachi is a beautiful Japanese girl who contracts leprosy and believes that her disease has dishonored her family. Sachi's parents let her know that she could absolve the family's shame by committing suicide. But Sachi, cursing her own cowardice, runs away to a remote mountain leper colony. There redemption comes only through her relationship with Matsu, the one friend from Sachi's youth who never severs touch with her.

Like me, most readers are probably appalled at the thought of disease being treated as dishonoring or shameful and dismayed that these feelings persist in AIDS prejudice today. Sachi's story grabs us in part because it feels quaint.

Yet the more I explore the great blight on our lives that violence is in America today, the less quaint the novel's storyline feels. Sachi stays with me in part because I realize that as a society, America has come to view violence through a lens not unlike Sachi's parents': to save ourselves and cleanse our society we believe we must banish, punish, and destroy offenders. Too often we view them not as human beings like ourselves with the capacity to do right as well as wrong but as pariahs to be purged.

Yet the "toss 'em out, lock 'em up" approach toward transgressors that flows from this framing is failing to give us the security we long for.

Imprisonment, tearing families apart and leaving children without parents, has hit an all-time high. The number of Americans behind bars quadrupled in a little over two decades and continues to increase. We isolate mostly young men in the prime of their lives in degrading and violent prisons- particularly young African American men, one in three of whom is in prison, on probation, or on parole. In big cities, it's one in two. Half of the imprisoned are hooked on drugs, but only a quarter get help in overcoming their addiction.

At the same time, government spending on corrections has skyrocketed, climbing sixfold in twenty years. In some states, imprisonment is so costly that taxpayers could have, for the same price, put each inmate through an Ivy League college!

Yet harsher treatment is not proving more effective, either in making us feel safer or in changing criminal behavior. Most released prisoners go on to offend again, and states with high rates of prison growth have not experienced correspondingly large drops in crime. As crime declined nationally during the 1990s, West Virginia, for example, had one of the highest prison growth rates even as its violent crime rate went up.

So what is effective?

Across the political spectrum, a multilayered movement is taking shape-from California's Republican governor to Ohio's chief of prisons to citizen innovators in communities nationwide-that builds on the key insights of Living Democracy. Security grows from a culture of connection based on mutual respect and accountability, including the engagement of those most affected. As Sachi's redemption came through her relationship with the one person who did not reject her, solutions for our society are emerging as citizens are fostering a culture of inclusion.

What works are efforts addressing the two emotions at the root of our growing pain: fear and shame.

Let me begin with fear, for I believe that fear can give rise to the very threats it most wants to dispel.

Two taxi drivers - one Russian, one Greek -- on opposite sides of the country recently responded with virtually the same words when I asked (as I typically do when I encounter a newcomer to our nation), "What do you think of America?"

"You're all afraid," they said, and they were not referring to the impact of 9/11. They each added, "You're all afraid of each other."

Taken aback to hear the same observation from people from very different parts of the world, I've gradually come to understand what they were telling me. Even as violent crime has dropped dramatically since the early 1990s and property crime has fallen for over twenty-five years-today more than half of us believe that crime is on the rise.

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Lappé is a pioneer in democratic thought and action. Democracy's Edge exemplifies her path blazing role in keeping democracy alive in our time.
-Cornel West
Professor, Princeton University

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