It's a neighborhood that breeds more than its fair share of the people who end up in the thing that these marchers are protesting. Poverty is the first prison. He chants in a melodic gospel voice and carries the Pan-African flag to call attention to the racial disparities in prisons. Last week the group came through Fresno, walked from Visalia to Corcoran and south to Delano, where the next state prison expansion is slated to be built. The core group of 15, many from Japan or out of state, is headed to Lompoc on a 32-day pilgrimage.
Locals join in for a day or two at a time.
It seems pretentious to have a bunch of East Coast Buddhist types walking and praying for us to see the error of our ways when politicians and prison lobbyists say we need to relieve overcrowding and bring economic development and guard jobs to poor Valley towns. We hear that those towns want prisons, believe they'll be their salvation. But it hasn't been salvation for Delano or the Central Valley. Since 1980 the state has built a third of all new prisons in the Central Valley, but we still have a jobless rate that soars above the rest of California. We now spend more housing our 161,000 prisoners than on educating our college students.