Each year our volunteer-run community radio station , WMMT-FM -- "Mountain Community Radio"-- produces a holiday call-in show for those inside our Nation's prisons. I live in Whitesburg, KY a small town in the Appalachian Coalfields that has quite a few prisons built up around it.
We started "Calls from Home" in hopes of reconnecting prisoners with their relatives at a time of year in which family is celebrated, and also as a response to human rights abuses in our local prisons.
I'm a regular lurker here and wanted to share the audio from the show as a form of a holiday greeting to the KOS community. Listen to some heart warming calls below the fold.
The calls came in from all over the country at steady pace via our answering machine: A young child calling his father for the first time. A mother who can't afford the gas money to visit.
Listening to a wife express love for her husband, who will be serving another twenty years on his sentence, is humbling. Hearing the despair of families who have loved ones sentenced for decades for non-violent crimes is enraging.
If you haven't noticed, the US prison industrial complex has gotten a little out of control of late. For a freedom loving nation, we're keeping a lot of our citizens locked up, about 1 in 33. That's more than any other country, and the problem seems to be getting worse.
Though crime rates have actually decreased in recent years, the prison population is getting larger. According to the Pew Research Center, our leadership has finally figured out that something is up:"...lawmakers are learning that current prison growth is not primarily driven by a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the population at large. Rather, it flows primarily from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison through popular "three strikes" measures and other sentencing enhancements, keeping them there longer." Folks like Senator Jim Webb are speaking up and should be encouraged.
In other words, they're starting to understand that there aren't more criminals than there once were, just more prisoners.
At the very least, this travesty means fighting to make sure that, this season, as we all get together to extend wishes of peace and goodwill to our fellow man, the incarcerated aren't left out. You can listen to more calls at www.callsfromhome.org
Season Greetings!