One of President Obama's first moves upon assuming his role as the 44th President of these United States of America was signing an executive order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by the beginning of February 2010. However, since then, there has been a great deal of debate about what to do with the approximately 245 detainees being held in Guantanamo. Governors have constantly coming out basically saying, "Not in my state," when posed with the question of whether or not they would be willing to take the suspected terrorists from Guantanamo into prisons in their state. This week, the Senate voted to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States for the foreseeable future. But this begs the question: For a country that has a higher prison rate than any other nation on the planet, do we truly have this little faith in our prisons and justice system?
As of the beginning of 2008, there were 2.31 million people in prisons throughout the United States. That is 1 out of every 99.1 adults in this country. Many of these people are in prison for extremely heinous murders, or, as may be more prevalent to this debate, for terrorist activities. What this country also has is something known as supermax prisons. These are prisons with extremely tight restrictions, and NOBODY has ever successfully broken out of a supermax prison in the United States. Timothy McVeigh was housed in an American prison before his execution. He was a convicted terrorist. The detainees in Guantanamo are suspected terrorists. I, along with the Obama Administration, do not propose giving the terrorists a thousand dollars and allowing them to run free through America. What I do propose, however, is moving them to the toughest supermax facilities in America, where they are likely to be more secure than they even currently are in Guantanamo Bay. This country has held countless terrorists and mass murderers in its prisons. If we cannot trust our prisons to hold suspected terrorists, then what is the true value of our prisons? If we cannot hold the suspected worst of the worst, who can? Put simply, Guantanamo Bay has become a symbol of American injustices that took place over the past 8 years, and in reaffirming American soft power to truly regain our ultimate respect around the world, Guantanamo needs to be closed.
