Every form of refuge has its price”
—The Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey
Every so often there are lyrics that take on a meaning of their own. In 1975, The Eagles released “Lyin’ Eyes” which contained a sentence that jumped out of the music and into the thought process of a generation.
You didn’t have to be alive in ’75 to know it’s true, there is a price to pay, no matter where we stake a claim. Sometimes the value of this refuge is so great we gladly pay it. Other times we realize we have leaned our proverbial “ladder against the wrong building” and found the price is too high.
In the mid ’60’s President Lyndon Johnson reacted to overwhelming pressure to create a War on Crime. By the mid ’70s mass incarceration was in full swing. For those who wanted law and order, this form of refuge provided an answer to their fears of danger in the streets. But the ensuing mass incarceration claimed a heavy price that cost us then and continues to cost us today in terms of social justice, the disintegration of the family, and wasted money that could have been going to help those in need.
The War on Crime created not only a mass of inmates, it created a mass of families without fathers, a mass of children whose mothers were gone at work or suffered grinding poverty, and a mass of minor offenders who were learning the wrong things from the wrong people in a prison system that was made to contain, not retrain.
Public policy is forged by imperfect people reacting to an imperfect world, but in the case of mass incarceration, the pendulum is now swinging the other way. No, there should not be looting of businesses, or a quick release of dangerous criminals. But, to care for society as a whole, we have to care for every individual, individually. As we seek to judge rightly, we should do so slowly, and with “unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” (1 Peter 3:8).
We have paid a high price for the refuge some sought in the ’60s and ’70s. Let’s be careful not to return to it.
Too high a price,
Jim
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