Texas Justice, American Injustice
Saturday 10 April 2010
by: Robert Perkinson, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
When members of Texas' Board of Education recently voted to eliminate "justice" from the list of terms schoolchildren have to master - in addition to elevating Rush Limbaugh to the pantheon of historic luminaries - they unleashed another salvo in the country's ceaseless culture wars. Yet they also, perhaps inadvertently, brought the curriculum in line with the state's inequitable social order. With its laissez-faire corporate climate and anemic human services (the state leads the nation simultaneously in carbon emissions and children without health insurance), Texas may be "wide open for business," but it has always had an uneasy relationship with Lady Justice.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the state's criminal justice system, which has historically privileged ferocity over fairness, revenge over rehabilitation. According to a new survey by the Pew Center on the States, Texas now has the largest penal system in the nation with 171,000 inmates, having surpassed California, which draws from a population 33 percent larger. Weak protections for indigent defendants; hard-line, elected judges; and a mile-long scroll of 2,324 separate felony statutes
