HOME  E-DEMOCRACY 98  E-DEBATE WEB MN-FORUM

Thomas Fiske      Response 3

Question 3: Given Minnesota's climbing prison population, the public pressure to reduce taxes and an apparent stalemate in the war on drugs, how would you, as governor, balance the cost of criminal justice with the need to ensure the safety of Minnesotans?

The ends of justice are not served by the expenditure of 
massive funds on more police, more judges and more 
prisons.  The U.S. today has twice the rate of 
incarceration of any country in the world.  It has twice 
the rate of incarceration as South Africa under the 
apartheid system.  

It is working people who are jailed in these prisons.  
However, the biggest criminals go unpunished and 
continue to hold high office in politics and business.  For 
example, those in banking and agribusiness who contrive 
famines in Third World countries and fleece the family 
farmers in the U.S. by charging monopoly prices for seed,
 fertilizer, pesticides and equipment.  Or those in 
government who covered up the danger of nuclear power, 
bombed the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan or led the 
genocidal war in Vietnam that resulted in three million 
Vietnamese dead.  The real source of criminality in this 
country is the system of class rule.  It is the system of the 
monopolization of ownership of the factories, mines, mills, 
banks and systems of transport by a relative handful of 
capitalists and landlords.

Crimes committed by working people represent a 
breakdown in human solidarity.  In the process of the 
strikes and demonstrations against corporate and 
government cutbacks, working people will rediscover the 
need for solidarity.  They will forge new social values 
different from the individualistic, self-seeking values 
inherent in capitalist society.

A different dynamic will happen with the capitalists 
and landlords.  In the developing economic crisis 
they will become more anti-social. In the 1930's, a 
similar period of economic crisis, many of them allowed
 their factories to be extremely unsafe.  More coal 
miners were wounded in the coal mines the first two 
years of World War II than there were GI's wounded in 
the war!  Many capitalists helped to finance anti-union 
vigilante squads and fascist bands, including here in the 
Twin Cities.

It is the working class that has the need, as a condition 
for its own fight for liberation, to forge new values of 
solidarity and lead in the fight for a new society with 
humane social values, a socialist society.

There is a very real corporate threat to the safety of 
working people in Minnesota.  Such threats as the 
pollution from corporate hog lots and nuclear power, 
relaxation of safety inspections on the airplanes to save
 money, the speed up of production work in the 
meatpacking industry are serious problems.

The lead in these fights for safety will need to be taken 
by the unions, the farm organizations, and the 
organizations of the oppressed nationalities and women.  

A much larger threat is the expansion of the U.S. war 
drive to Eastern Europe and the doorstep of Russia.  
There have been important demonstrations demanding 
"U.S. Hands off Iraq" and "U.S. Hands off Yugoslavia."

My party, the Socialist Workers Party, and its youth 
supporters, the Young Socialists, are deeply involved 
in these fights for justice.