c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ With the recent release of”The Hurricane,”and the apparent settlement of a 25-year-old lawsuit filed against New York State by former inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility, it would appear both art and life now recognize the criminal justice system’s often brutal and even illegal treatment of inmates.

Yet, even as the media and the entertainment industry celebrate their own own enlightment about the criminal justice system, there remain those who just don’t get it.

The newly released movie,”Hurricane,”for example, is an example of how the entertainment industry has come to grasp the criminal justice system.

It chronicles the long, painful odyssey of Rubin”Hurricane”Carter, a boxer with a lengthy criminal record who was convicted twice for a 1966 triple murder he did not commit.

After spending nearly 20 years in New Jersey prisons, Carter’s conviction was overturned in 1985 by a federal judge who ruled local prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence from his attorneys while claiming simultaneously the murders committed against three white customers in a northern New Jersey tavern were racially motivated.

As he noted in his autobiography,”The Sixteenth Round,”the convictions proved that in the racially-charged atmosphere of the era, an outspoken, black ex-offender like Carter could expect to receive little justice from the system.

The same could be said about the prisoners at Attica. There, in the midst of a 1971 inmate uprising over living conditions at the prison, state troopers, acting on the orders of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, stormed the prison compound, shooting indiscriminately and killing more than 40 people, including several guards the inmates had taken hostage.

In the aftermath of the massacre, New York state officials misled the media and the public at-large by covering up the actual events, claiming among other things the throats of the hostages had been slit by the inmates.

Today, nearly 30 years later, state officials are still refusing to come clean. While agreeing to pay surviving inmates and their attorneys some $12 million, the State of New York _ with a new administration and a different governor _ remains unwilling to admit its guilt.

And therein lies the problem.

It is one thing for the truth to be unraveled by the courts, reported by the media and dramatized by the film industry. But it is another thing entirely for that truth to be admitted by the elected representatives of government.

As Tom Wicker suggests in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, the failure of the government _ in this case the administration of Gov. George Pataki _ to acknowledge the truth does a grave disservice to the public it serves.

An admission of the government’s guilt, Wicker observes,”might have some salutary effect on the `get tough’ attitude the public now favors for inmates. It might save the public some of the millions now being spent in New York and elsewhere on new prisons. … It might ease the psychological hurts suffered by thousands of people who were not even at Attica, but who became disillusioned because of it.” Among the disillusioned is a new generation of prison inmates, who see the tribulations of”Hurricane”Carter and the men of Attica revisited in their own experience.

Many might say, as a result of the decisions in the Carter and Attica cases that, given enough time, the system works. The reality, however, is that in too many cases the system does not work. Indeed, one of the peculiar ironies of prison ministry is that chaplains are often forced to encourage their parishioners to become better than the system that imprisons them _ to convince some that the cops who profiled them, the prosecutors who suborned perjury against them and the judges who allowed their rights to be violated must answer to a holy God.

That some measure of justice was rendered for Carter and the men of Attica is the result of Divine Providence _ angels moving in where men feared to tread. For many behind bars, divine justice is the only justice they get.

DEA END ATCHISON