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Closing minds and books leads to building more jails

After more than 20 years of experience as a journalist, I still find there are stories I don’t want to write, but, at the same time, I feel obligated to do it, not only because I am a journalist, but more importantly because informing the public about those stories may lead to change.

The first story is about a state legislator in Colorado and about a member of the Colorado Board of Education (both of them Republican) who last week requested the revision of thousands of books in Spanish recently donated by the Mexican Consulate in Denver to local schools and public libraries. The legislator and the board member want to be sure those books do not include “offenses” to the United States.

What State Representative Kent Lambert and what Board of Education member Marcia Leal consider as an “offense” and as “anti-American” is the possibility that some books may include a reference saying that after the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 the United States did not keep its part of the peace treaty and illegally expropriated land that previously belonged to Mexican families for several centuries.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened, to the point that more than a century and a half later, there are still several cases pending at the courts of several states in the Southwest.

It should cause for concern to see that public officials in high places ignore history and prefer to promote their own version of nationalism and nativism, suppressing all other versions of history not in agreement of the “official story.”

It should be even more problematic to realize there is support from the government to enact such suppression, as if there were only one way to understand history.

Nothing has only one interpretation, not even the Bible. For that reason, to appoint a committee to “revise” the books seems ridiculous, until you realize schools are no longer a place to teach but a place to indoctrinate students in a certain social and scientific worldview, where creativity and critical thinking are discouraged.

Perhaps because and legislatures dangerously promote only one way of thinking and offer only a false idea of individuality, void of content and meaning, perhaps for that very reason there is a need to build more jails. And even more jails will be build, because it is a good business.

For example, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) announced last week a new contract to manage detainee populations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Georgia and a new contract with the state of Arizona to manage hundreds of Arizona inmates at a CCA's center in southern Colorado.

CCA is the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and three states. CCA currently operates 64 facilities in 19 states, with a total design capacity of approximately 85,000 beds.

When books and minds and forcibly closed, jail’s doors will be widely open.

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