Jailbreak!

I am by nature a nervous person. I worry about a lot of things, most of them outside my control. But it wasn’t until politicians began discussing the question over what to do with Guantánamo detainees that I understood the full scope of the mortal danger I am in.

Some background: President Obama said Guantánamo should be closed during his campaign, explicitly named it as a priority shortly after being elected, and, true to his word, ordered the prison shut within a year shortly after being sworn in. Recently, however, the path toward hitting Gitmo has hit some political snags. There’s a debate over what to do with the detainees. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats stripped from a war funding bill $80 million that Obama had requested be used to close the facility by January 2010.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) summed up his fears about Guantánamo inmates during a news conference. “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States,” he said. Framing this as a bipartisan issue, he later added, “I think there’s a general feeling, as I’ve already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn’t want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we’re going to stick with that.” He went on to explain that not only does he not want terrorists released in the United States (a courageous position for any American politician to take), but that “part of what we don’t want is them be put in prisons in the United States. We don’t want them around the United States.”

Reid is of course echoing the sentiments of many of his more conservative colleagues in Congress, including, among others, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who said, "Americans like the fact that we haven’t been attacked at home since 9/11, and they don’t want the terrorists at Guantánamo back on the battlefield or in their backyards."

At first I was skeptical: Surely this is little more than political grandstanding, right? Politicians get endless mileage out of portraying terrorists as evil and omnipotent. Others who will obliterate us, our families, and, presumably, our midrange chain eateries should we let our guard down for the briefest flicker of a moment. But then I realized the more likely explanation: Our members of Congress know something we don’t about our nation’s prisons. None of us is safe.

To my alarm, I discovered that there is a high-security federal prison, United States Penitentiary Hazelton, less than 200 miles from the Center for American Progress office here in Washington, D.C. On the one hand, our members of Congress are telling us that prisons such as Hazelton are safe places to keep some of the nation’s most violent offenders. On the other hand, well, they’re saying just the opposite. Conspiracy?

Obviously, something is very, very wrong with our nation’s federal prisons, or our elected representatives wouldn’t be this scared. I’m no expert, so I’m not qualified to speculate as to the nature of the security vulnerabilities. Maybe the bars, when there are bars, are set too far apart. Maybe the entire nationwide prison security system is controlled by a single, poorly guarded “ON/OFF” switch in some bureaucrat’s office in Washington. Or maybe years of overcrowding and widespread incarceration for non-violent offenses have made the whole imprisoning-everyone project a tenuous one at best. Whatever the case, our elected representatives aren’t telling us the truth, and at some point it will lead to a crime wave that will make GTA IV look like Barbie Horse Adventures: Riding Camp.

The most disturbing part about this conspiracy is just how high up the totem pole it runs: Some politicians are clearly devoted to covering up this issue. “Our prisons are filled with dangerous people, including terrorists. And not a single one has escaped,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said after the funding was stripped. This white washing of the problem is disturbing enough, but it’s nothing compared to the Americans-endangering gall of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who back in January asked for Gitmo detainees to be imprisoned in his district. I’d say that Durbin and Murtha are both traitors who deserve to be imprisoned for their recklessness, but we all know how much good that would do.

If we are to believe our politicians—and why wouldn’t we?—it’s clear that the nation’s prisons aren’t up to the task of detaining rapists and serial killers. I live within 200 miles of all sorts of dangerous miscreants who are poised to break out and kill me at any moment, and I’m ready to start freaking out about it. It’s time to start calling on Congress to provide answers, or pretty soon we’ll all be imprisoned—by terror.

Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.

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