Imagine for a moment that everyone in jail deserved to be there. They are simply too dangerous to be out on the streets and interacting with others in society.
Now imagine that some of those trillions the governments of this world have was actually put into rehabilitating these individuals instead of punishing them, or turning them into workers?
Can you imagine if every inmate at every prison had their own personal psychologist/counselor who they could speak to whenever they wanted? Where they could get to the bottom of whatever problems they have and address those problems so that when they leave the prison, they are no longer a danger to society?
How much would such a person be worth to this world? How much power to get through to struggling youths would someone who has lived that life, faced their demons and conquered them have? I imagine an awful lot.
But instead we have prison systems that non-violent criminals go into and come out as violent ones. We do not have rehabilitation, but education on how to be an unsavory member of society.
We largely ignore the prison system. For all the anti-government media I have absorbed, the prisoners of this world seem forgotten by most. But I think it is time we started remembering them.
If we ignore the fact that many in there are innocent or non-violent criminals, and try to convince ourselves that all in there are genuinely dangerous, we still have to admit to ourselves that they likely would not have been if they had grown up in a different world.
We have corrupting forms of media assaulting us at every possible angle, and mass impoverishment that leads people to do things they otherwise would not in order to feed themselves and their families. Should we really be giving up on them so easily? Should we really just be forgetting about them and the fact that they've been locked in cages by the very system that conditioned them to be the type of person that belongs in a cage?
If a kid grows up listening to songs on the radio about shooting people and selling crack, and if he later in life ends up shooting someone who tried to rob the crack he was selling; should we be mad at him? Or should we be mad at the radio stations that conditioned him to believe selling crack was the way to go?
If another child grows up repeatedly seeing news broadcasts about bullied children shooting up their schools, and watching movies like John Wick where a supposed hero is depicted shooting bullies in the head one after the other without even showing a glimpse of emotion on their face, and if that child later buys a gun and goes into school and shoots a few kids who had been bullying them; should we disappointed in the child or in the news company and the movie industry that together led him to do what he did?
My guess would be that even the majority of rapists, serial killers and paedophiles are likely adopting their interests from TV and pornography. Should we continue to be mad at them or should we finally point the finger at the corrupting influence rather than the resulting symptom?
For the past however many decades, it appears we have opted to be mad at the one who committed the crime rather than the environment that brought them to do it. Perhaps that is why it has been so easy for us to forget about them, to such a point that I do not even know a phrase for a type of activism that seeks to stop locking humans in cages, when I know a phrase for so many other types of activism. Perhaps no one cares to have them truly rehabilitated. Perhaps we have simply told ourselves that rehabilitation is not possible and so incarceration will just have to do.
But the thing is, if it is truly our TV's and our Radio's, our poverty and our poor mental and physical health, that leads so many of us to do really shitty things to one another; then we have the evidence right there that rehabilitation is possible. I'm no psychologist, but it seems to me that in most cases a professional might even be able to use the knowledge of the crime, and the history of the person, to uncover the conditioning that led to the behaviour, and therefor reveal the lesson that needs to be unlearned.
I've only started thinking about this issue - in any significant capacity - for the first time day. And yet I already have an approach to rehabilitation that seems rather sound to me. So how could they not have came up with an approach of their own and perfected it by now?
Aren't we supposed to get better at things the longer we do them, so why are prisons getting worse? I think the obvious truth is that they are not trying to rehabilitate people anymore - if they ever were. They've given up, and prisoners have become a source of income rather than a responsibility to help someone overcome their problems.
I think we ought to look at criminal behaviour, in the violent or harmful sense, as a mental illness- or an emotional one. If we can label a dangerously low amount of Vitamin C in the body as scurvy- and then label that a physical disease, then why should we not look at the condition of having dangerously low levels of compassion, and label thatas an emotional or mental impairment?
By calling a lack of compassion a disease, we can put an urgency on it to be addressed, rather than simply accepted as normal human behaviour and then punished. If it were considered a disease, we might have funding and scientific research into human behaviour that was able to reveal to us the true sources of corruption within society so we could stomp them out and replace them with mechanisms that condition us with love for one another instead.
A compassion deficiency is most certainly an illness to me, I realise. And perhaps it is one that even the best of us are suffering from if we have decided to give up on those of us who have been forced into cages for living the lives they were led to live by a system that we are all responsible for perpetuating.
I think we ought to consider what one rehabilitated life might be worth to society, and then consider what a hundred thousand might be worth? Then perhaps we might do more to ensure that prisons be about more than punishment.
