Imagine you’re 21 years old and about to graduate college. You’re an only child finishing your studies and looking forward to attending law school next Fall. One day on a warm April evening in the Bay Area, you receive a phone call from your aunt telling you that both of your parents were arrested.
The next day, your parents’ arrest makes both the local and national headlines. It seems they were caught up in something called Operation Cyberstorm, which was so huge that even FBI Director Robert Mueller decided to come down to the Bay Area to do a press conference.
Your parents, two middle-aged Pakistani American immigrants who have never been arrested before, were relaxing the night before in their Costco pajama suits and engaging in their usual activities of cooking food, filling the medicine box for your grandmother, cleaning up, and eventually relaxing in front of the TV.
In the morning, a dozen or so armed agents broke through the door at 6 am, dragged them out of bed, and arrested them. Your dad read the nearly three dozen count indictment and almost passed out from shock. Your mom and dad are kept in detention pending the trial.
Your property is now under litigation, and whatever money you had is now gone. Bad news spreads fast and nobody wants to be associated with you or your family. One second, you’re living a privileged, suburban life, and the next second, you’re broke and essentially homeless. Oh, yeah, you also have to leave school to take care of your two grandmothers, help pay the bills, run a family business, and find money to keep paying your parents’ attorney.
Your parents stay in jail for one year until you can muster enough funds to get them out. Your parents refuse a plea bargain and instead fight their case and believe they might finally win on appeal. The ordeal lasts a decade. After your 30th birthday, the court rules against your family, and your parents both go to jail for another 4.5 years.
That’s just a part of my family’s story. (Spoiler alert: I was the 21-year-old kid. I wrote about it in more detail in my memoir.)
But my story isn’t uncommon in the United States, a country that incarcerates more people than any other country on Earth. America remains number one with the largest prison population in the world, with 20% of the world’s incarcerated people, even though we only have 5% of the world’s population.
We’ve experienced a 500% increase in our prison population in the past forty years mostly due to harsh sentencing laws that punitively punish the poor, communities of color, and nonviolent drug offenders. Apparently, you have to be wealthy, white, well-connected, and the President of the United States to escape accountability and jail time.
What about the rest of us?
I’ve often said that the U.S. prison industrial complex is like Galactus, the Destroyer of Worlds who faces off against the Fantastic Four. But our modern-day Galactus destroys more than just lives, it consumes families, neighborhoods, and generations.
If you want to truly understand America, you have to understand our prison industry and the immense destruction it leaves in its wake, especially as it is becoming increasingly privatized and seeks to profit off a second Trump Administration.
I enjoyed spending an hour talking to the hosts of an important, new podcast entitled THE FALLOUT CHRONICLES which focuses on the stories of family members of incarcerated individuals as they try their best to find hope, resilience, and a sense of community after “the fallout.”
I hope you take the time to listen, and I hope it’s useful.
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