A friend recently sent an old posting from Damon Eris where he named me “Oddball of the Week.” I don’t know Eris and I have no internet access in prison, so I have never seen this posting before. In it, Eris recounted my run for governor from prison, fairly and accurately quoting me and providing a pretty decent sound-bite summary of my position.

      He then went on to lament that “an individual like Swain has been driven to the advocacy of madness rather than prison reform.” This “madness” I advocate is scrapping the whole system rather than trying to fix it. Eris then cites statistic after statistic to demonstrate that our systems of justice and corrections are completely dysfunctional. He concluded, rather nicely (if not overly dramatic), “If we allow for the breakdown of civilization behind bars, it should be no surprise that those behind bars will call for an end of civilization on this side of them.”

      I have a couple of disagreements with Eris’ conclusions and would like to respond.

      First, I am not “the most extreme left-wing,” as he charges. I don’t take issue with Eris calling me an “oddball,” but I do take issue with being called a leftist. I know left-wing politics because I used to embrace them back in my reformist days, back when I agreed with Damon Eris that we needed to hold hands and sing “Cumbayah,” that we could create the change we could believe in, and all of that pie-in-the-sky sun-worship. But I am no leftist now.

      Barney Frank is a left-winger. I don’t think he makes sense, I think he makes a good hostage—as good a hostage as John Boehner might, and Boehner is a right-winger. Frank and other leftists might also make good hat-racks, but they have never made any good policy I could support.

      In our political dichotomy of left and right, both ideologies have proven completely bankrupt. Both of their solutions are now and always have been part of the problem.

      What do you call “solutions” that are part of the problem?

      This system has been around for centuries with liberals and conservatives pulling levers and pressing buttons, opening and closing valves, tinkering and tweaking, only for the same old results: war, poverty, crime, drugs, homelessness, mental illness, rape culture, and on and on.

      See a pattern? We oust one group of fuck-ups in favor of another group of fuck-ups, and nothing good ever results. Perhaps instead of entrusting fuck-ups on the left or right to “fix” the system, we need to scrap it. Perhaps the system isn’t really ours. Perhaps this is a system of pillage for the elite who keep tricking all of us into dragging stones up the side of this complex pyramid.

      So that brings me to my second issue with Eris, the very thing that makes me an “oddball.” Eris contends that when I advocate scrapping this system, it is “madness,” and the Eris solution is “prison reform.”

      I know a little about prison reform. My Associate of Arts with a concentration in psychology exposed me to the social science material related to justice and corrections and in my extended studies, I read every relevant, published work on crime, violence and corrections written between 1972 and 1999. As Secretary of Catholic Justice Fellowship, a prisoner social action ministry, I successfully lobbied the Ohio Catholic Conference to support parole reform legislation, Policy Advisor Jim Tobin speaking on behalf of the bishops before the Ohio Assembly. As a member of CURE-Ohio’s Prisoner Advisory Board for 2 years, I influence that organization’s direction. My written reports on the social, economic, and demographic impacts of imprisonment were submitted to senators and representatives.

      In the end, Senator Jeff Johnson, the sponsor of reform legislation, was pushed out of office and into prison; Catholic Justice Fellowship was forcibly silenced by prison officials, and I was targeted for plausibly-deniable repression for a decade, the parole board extending my imprisonment for eleven years now in order to stick it to me for my reformist efforts. The prison reforms that others and I struggled and sacrificed in order to see materialize? Gone. Dead. Forgotten.

      So ten years after the death of any possibility for meaningful prison reform, Damon Eris googles “prison,” discovers the harsh reality, and thinks we need to “reform” the system. Things have gone more than a decade in the wrong direction even since my reform days—and not just the prison system.

      Reform? Really???

      I think “madness” is when you stick your hand in the same fire over and over again, expecting a different result. How many times have we been bamboozled into sticking our hands into the “reform” fire? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? A million? No offense to Damon Eris, as well-intending as I’m sure he is, but sticking his hand in that fire will result in the same burn as the last ten thousand times. By my thinking, that is madness.

      Perhaps the Damon Erises of the world, as well-intending as they are, don’t want to face that reality. Perhaps they are comforted by their dreams of reform and hope, bunny rabbits and rainbows, moon-beams and fairy dust. But in the short time since Eris’ “oddball” piece on me, I notice there are a lot of Sean Swains out there. They’re rejecting the Eris approach to reform and they’re taking to the streets in New York, Oakland, Cleveland, Chicago; they’ve abandoned polite discourse in favor of confrontation. They’ve scrapped bunny rabbits and rainbows; they ear rubber bullets and drink tear gas.

      They’re only getting started. Their numbers are quietly growing and as the system continues to slide toward its own inevitable dissolution, their number will continue to grow. Our numbers. The “oddballs.”

      It was no less than Martin Luther King who said that those who make nonviolent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

      Perhaps Damon Eris should put down the pom-poms, reject the bunny rabbits and rainbows, and join the “oddballs.”

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