The verdict from Jasper Texas was swift and predictable: John William King was found guilty of murdering James Byrd, Jr. But this gruesome crime must also be seen as the effect -- the predictable effect -- of a criminal justice system based on violence. Michael Kroll, an associate editor of Pacific News Service, specializes in criminal justice and death penalty issues.

The verdict in Jasper, Texas, holding John William King guilty of the gruesome murder of James Byrd, Jr. is like some of President Clinton's statements -- literally true, but incomplete and misleading. A true verdict would have found all of us bear some responsibility for Byrd's violent death.

John King, aged 24, emerged from prison in July of 1997, after spending two years of an eight-year sentence for a non-violent crime. Involved in a burglary at age 17, he spent two months in a "boot camp" and was put on parole. Repeated violations of parole brought him before a judge who sentenced him to eight years in Beto One, a "tough" prison.

The violence done to and by King behind prison walls in those two years did not concern the rest of us. As long as the virus of racial violence is confined to "them," no one outside knows or cares to know what every prisoner in America knows -- prisons are raging cauldrons of violence, both systematic and random. Violence that prisoners survive primarily through racial identification.

"In prison, the only protection you have is your race," says Dwight E. Abbott, recently released from Folsom Prison, where he was a member of a prominent white gang. "All free-world prejudices become obvious and intense inside because of the necessity of survival. Only your own will protect you, and there's safety in numbers."

Abbott, who is as repulsed by James Byrd's brutal death as anyone, knows the rage that sparked John William King's vicious violence. Unlike us, however, he is not surprised that a convict emerges from prison and acts out of emotions based on his prison conditioning. That conditioning starts early. An African-American, now a ward of the California Youth Authority described his first day: "When you get there, you go to your own race and they run down what you have to do."

Identification-by-race is the fuel for the fires of rage. It is only when the consequences of that combination spill over into the "free world" -- as in Jasper -- that it registers with a "shocked" public which has, through its silence, given prison administrators virtual carte blanche to promote and exploit the very violence the prison is purportedly designed to protect us from.

"There is no way out of this dilemma," says Abbott, "until the public demands a change. There is no cure within the system. They use racial violence to justify building more prisons. There is no internal incentive to change."

Abbott, who has spent 38 of his 56 years behind bars, remembers a time when the public did care. Some 30 years ago, programs existed -- both within the system, designed to mitigate the attitudes and deficiencies that lead to prison, and outside, to provide a transition to self-sufficiency: job training, housing, some decent clothes.

Parole, once designed to provide these essential services, is now best characterized by a sign on the door of a Colorado parole agency: "We trail 'em; we nail 'em; we jail 'em."

"Just deciding to be a good citizen isn't enough," says Abbott. "Without assistance, convicts must turn to the same people they turned to in prison. Even trying to put their best foot forward, they're marked as prisoners."

Jasper County prosecutor Pat Hardy condemned King for defying "God and Christianity and everything most people in this country stand for." But the founder of the Christian faith did not turn His back on the captives of His day. One must ask, what is it that we do stand for?

"Society and its prison instruments made Jasper, Texas," Abbott concludes. "That's prison rage expressing itself. This wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. Society doesn't want to face it, but as long as we continue to rely on the violent instruments of the modern American prison, we're in for a lot of trouble."