Allow me to get political for a moment. Those of you who know me, know that next year I am heading out to American University in Washington DC to study political science. Whenever I tell someone that for the first time, their response is always something along the lines of "future president, huh?". I always tell them no, I could never run for office because I am unelectable. This is the reason that I am unelectable, because I have the nerves to stand up and make the unpopular (but true) claim that our criminal "justice" system is not just whatsoever. This is an issue that will never get fixed, looking "soft on crime" is career suicide for a politician. As a result, millions of prisoners are left to suffer unjustly in a debilitating environment, victims of the system.
We claim to be "the land of the free", and that our Democratic ideals make people much more "free" than the Communistic ideals of China, North Korea, and the former USSR....we even had a 40 year nuclear standoff to that point. Yet if that were true, why is it that American, the place to "live free" has 25% of the worlds prison population?
America doesn't want to think about prisoners. They view people who commit crimes as evil, not deserving of society. However, what they don't realize is that so many of these "criminals" who committed minor crimes like theft or certain things that shouldn't even be crimes, are not hardened souless killing machines. Nay, they are young impressionable people in need of molding. We could get them help, and mold them in the image of a model citizen. But that would require time and effort. Nay, we find it so much easier to lock them up and throw away the key. The problem is, by locking them in a prison environment, we are molding them to be a criminal. And thus the self-fulfilling prophecy of the American "Justice" system prevails.
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