Rally denies important facts

But the Take Back the Night campaign has repercussions that go far beyond the intent of taking back the night. It is really more like a call to take back the streets in the name of the white middle class, than a true campaign to end violence.

The campaign is a nationwide endeavor to mobilize more local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to crack down on oppressed communities, in turn perpetuating police violence against national minorities.

It is conceivable that the participants in the rally, and possibly the organizers of it, are unaware of the consequences of an increased police state. Let's take a look at the current situation with American prisons, and to further illustrate the point that more police and prisons are not the answer we will look at the detrimental effects to children caused by the incarceration of their parents.

Currently, 1.5 million children in the United States have a parent in prison, according to a Justice Department report released August 30. This is a 60 percent increase from 1991, paralleling the 62 percent increase in prisoners during the 1990s. These children comprise 3.6 percent of all children in the United States, according to the report.

As a tool of social control, prisons are part of the larger system of unequal education, economic opportunities and discrimination that keep national minorities from reaching equality in the United States.

By setting children up with the disadvantage of both poverty and an incarcerated parent, America sets back these primarily black and Latino children even further. Already America has 2 million prisoners, 50 percent of which are black though blacks make up only 12 percent of the national population.

The prison system is not set up to rehabilitate. If it were it would make it easier for families to visit inmates, instead of placing them in prisons that are usually too far out of the way for a poor family to visit without major inconvenience.

Feel-good liberals like the National Organization for Women, which helps promote the Take Back the Night campaign, do not take these matters into consideration. Instead of advocating a system that creates meaningful jobs -- the only antidote to crime -- the campaign seeks to perpetuate the prison-industrial complex that profits from human warehousing.