I’m not all that political. I have no record. I could not have lived my life as a mechanical engineer with one. The records we are creating with our outrageous number of people in corporate run prisons in the U.S. is racist . It is the sharecropping shanty shack of our times.. It is excluding large segments of our population.
When we create so many casual “felons”, mostly black and hispanic, we lose the ability to tell who is indeed dangerous and too many of our citizens end up living outside of our system.
I wrote this song and have assigned a Creative Commons license.
Joe Clark
Oh I can’t get a job cause
I sold that weed
to that cop in
ninety three
On the piece of paper they always ask me
have you had a felony
I was fighting my war on poverty
when the war on drugs got me
now there’s no work at all for me
no Social Security
Oh they threw my tail in the company jail
and threw away the key
so I told her to find her someone else
and forget about me
So I work at outside in hot and in cold
and we live in this trailer park
and when people ask me who I am
I say I’m….I’m Joe Clark
So I’ll build you a fence
and work in your yard
if ever there was a worker
that was Joe Clark
so if you’ll give me a chance
I won’t be a slob
I’m Joe Clark
and I need a job
Oh they threw my tail in the company jail
and they threw away the key
so I told her to find her someone else
and forget about me
by david michael jackson
