American Manifesto Part Seven: Prisons

American Manifesto Part Seven: Prisons

Modernization of the American Prison System

The population of American prisoners is viral because the current prison system is not an organization based on the goal of correction or re-mediation.  The system is designed as a paradoxical educational system.  It is an educational system that teaches criminals how to become better criminals, view honest people as weak and to distrust anyone in a position of stability.  The perimeters of the non-criminal world keep prisoners at a distance with a stigma and a scarlet letter and therefore prevent assimilation.  This is permeated by the run away criminalization of drugs, which creates a Machiavellian sub-culture that breeds more violence, murder, tax-fraud, rape, battery, home invasion, child-support delinquency, and the obliteration of families than if the substances were controlled legal substances.

We need a moral corrections system that utilizes morality as a transcendent mechanism of change that fosters humanity rather than a void of civility.  Morality is a human construct which overlaps components of religious institutions, but is not unique of or limited to any one of them.  Religion or religious principles of forgiveness should not lead or be left out of the solution as a voluntary source of change inside prisons.  Morality is what makes us human, and to some degree some criminals have never been taught or possessed the toolbox of morality to coexist productively in greater society.  This is America’s battleground to demonstrate mutually-beneficial moral social paradigms to prisoners through replacement mechanisms that teach skill sets that can lead to a path of self-sufficiency in both working and moral society. 

We have the largest prison population on the planet.  Our greatest problem in this country is that we can not talk to each other on an honest level so we label, separate, and fear.  Most people do not go to prison.  Most people do not have a family member in prison.  But the rate of people who had a parent in prison who go to prison is a cycle of failure at the heart of addressing the problem. 

Mind over Body

Why do people go to prison?  What constitutes a crime? 

Why if we have such massive overcrowding issues through out our prison systems do we continue to let our zest for vengeance override our call for discretion by a detailed consideration of the public benefits and determents of a one-size-fits-all concrete-box approach?  “Problems can not be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them.”  Albert Einstein

Prison system should be segmented based on crimes and the gang relations of the individuals not locations.  States should fund prisons based on the number of prisoners they send to the prisons, not whether or not the prison is physically in their state.  The prisons could be physically located near each other, but basically miles away depending on what goes on in their walls.  This type of segmentation can create a ladder work of consequences in environments where there are currently few consequences but the indefinite one a prisoner is already enduring.  In many states, local sheriffs collect prisoners into smaller pools focused on directing cash to small governments rather than to larger state facilities that might have rehabilitation assets capable of actually assisting the prisoner.

Currently many prisons have segmented dormitories or pods of restricted access, but these are often temporary holding sessions within the same physical institution.  Intermediate rotations permit prisoners to return to the same normalized social setting.  This normalization will often allow the prisoner to reacclimatize in an expedited manner given his or her familiarity with the environment from which he or she was previously segregated.  This assists gang leaders to maintain power and does not correlate disruption of a stabilized system.

There are truly evil people in this world which no amount of punishment or correction could make a bit of difference on the fact that they have violated the rules that hold a healthy society together, but when we start to group the people who have made a mistake and are still capable of wanting to change for the better in with the lowest end of evil out of a sense of vengeance we have flipped the correctional system upside down.  Some people become predators.

The evolution of prisons in the western world has gone from the apportionment of physical punishment to the body for crime towards a social and emotional punishment of the human spirit.  We have supposedly outlawed torture in the forms of hanging, quartering, decapitation, and flogging, for interment and a deprivation of various rights such as privacy, freedom, and voting.  We have collectively decided to amend on an individual basis the bill of rights to a prisoner to restrict a prisoner from interacting with greater society as punishment for not adhering to the collective social contract of America’s laws.  There is a gray area of what a potential prisoner’s rights should be; which ones are unalienable, and which ones in this confined world are now considered privileges. 

America in its need for redemption has moved towards punishment of the mind over the body.  This has allowed the American Civil Liberties Union to move the line and expand the list of apparently unalienable rights to an extent that has neutered the prison system from adapting on one extreme.  On the other extreme prison administrations have descended into a guttural system of concrete, stoic and inflexible to the potential of the individuals it houses on a pyramid of tax dollars and profit for larger and larger human-factory chicken-farms.  We also have created the offshore prison in Guantanamo, that questions the very essence of who we are as democratic Americans as world-citizens.  There needs to be a better balance.

Consequences of the Current Prison System

The ramifications of this are evidenced by the proliferation of gangs across America’s prison systems and criminal nations as controlling councils of the real laws inside our prisons where guards hope for a palatable median between gang and warden authority.  Prisons actually make people more violent by learning the unwritten terms of service agreements dictated by the gangs.  Fringe prisoners sign blood-contracts in order to survive inside the walls. 

Prison guards are often outnumbered three-hundred to one and are incapable of counteracting the gang-imposed penalties for non-compliance with the gang’s internal G-codes.  This occurs in part because prisoners are treated like dogs rather than people and the external wealth generated by the criminalization of drugs finances in-prison power to drug-gang affiliates.  But some prisoners were long gone into apex predator behavior before prison ever got involved.

This dynamic encourages an escalated sense of violence hinging on the basic human instinct to survive as well as the expansion of gangs as these new gang members exit prison.  By modernizing and adapting the current system to keep the fringe “less violent” prisoners away from the worst offenders in the first place and by adapting the methods of how we define imprisonment we can better equip our prison system to achieve the collective goal for society of reducing criminal acts and spending less of our tax dollars in the process. 

“Less violent,” does not necessary mean how a person got into prison, although violence is a predominating factor, systems should be able to utilize the actions and reformation of a person in prison to adjust housing and freedoms while in the overall system to a greater flexibility than we are currently capable.  One of those options should be sending selected individuals across the country either as an additional penalty or precaution.

The decriminalization of marijuana, and as described earlier under the healthcare section the more expansive process of making all drugs legal controlled substances would neuter violent tax-avoiding cartels.  Police budgets could focus on murders and real crimes according to Lincoln.  The drug war is the number one issue at addressing our federal deficit due to its debilitating pernicious infection of dysfunction that exacerbates the real problem into a behemoth which devours the budgets of our budgets for public safety, health care, education, homeland security, and national defense.

Prostitution should also be legalized and regulated in America.  Obviously there are places in Nevada and in Holland where prostitution has been legalized which would serve as an example of potential outcomes.  If prostitution were legalized in regulated areas and integrated into a health-screening process for the prostitutes to mitigate the risks for sexually-transmitted diseases, most of the negative externalities of prostitution including violence against women and non-taxable cash income streams would be vastly reduced.  The costs of our law enforcement officers and judicial system would be reduced to dealing with the tax issues of collecting federal and state revenues on these businesses rather than running a hooker through lock-up for the fifteenth time, because of her inability to reconcile her daddy issues.  We reduce prison problems, because the individuals meeting only these activity thresholds are never in prisons.  Hookers could also quit getting raped and robed at gunpoint in the back of Econoline vans.

If Americans were capable of setting aside the self-righteous hypocrisy and moral superiority fostered through the condemnation of sex that has been bombarded on us as a nation under “God”; we could verbalize and enact laws that recognize that someone’s sexual practices are not directly related to their moral compass.  There is a difference between sin and immorality; one is a law, one is innate.

Sex is the most natural of acts that is mandatory for our survival. By dealing with so many of sex’s tangential effects on our lives as human beings through brushed-backed only-in-the-bedroom discussions amongst our adolescents and adults we are actually encouraging ignorant, irresponsible, and risky behavior that produces higher monetary and healthcare costs in our society. 

The bottom line with marijuana, prostitution, and to a degree abortion, is the same lesson we learned through the prohibition of alcohol.  When we as a society decide to criminalize acts where the primary victim in the crime is also the perpetrator we will continue to create a revolving-door of people continuing to commit what society deems a crime without any intention by the victim to alter the perpetrator’s behavior. 

There will always be marijuana, cocaine, prostitution, abortion, and alcohol consumers in society.  The current and past laws to eliminate those acts and behaviors have been horrendously ineffective at their stated goals.  These puritanical laws have been tremendously productive at creating “criminal” subsystems to meet the needs of these consumers external to the tax system.  The externalities of these laws have led to crowded prison systems, courtrooms, and ultimately drained tax dollars from the American people that could have been better utilized in addressing more pertinent problems.

Prisoners with out Options can not Choose Rehabilitation

Crimes should be associated with the range of violation in connection with the continued actions of the incarcerated.  The entry-point of the correctional system should not eliminate the need for a person to be self-sufficient.  The entry point for bottom end crimes should be coordinated with the elimination of certain forms of governmental assistance, mandatory work programs through a structured system of surrogate-employment to the benefit of the government that would descend into incarceration with non-compliance. 

Consequences could include subsidized-alternative governmental assistance that is contingent on a criminal’s participation in non-prison contingencies that incorporate educational opportunities.  The digital educational could be done with minimal instructors in specific adult education laboratories that trend towards self-sufficiency.  The self-directed and non-self directed modes allow systematic flexibility for individual election and criminal justice system control through video technologies that can open windows to available alternatives for criminals blind to potential opportunities.  These video technologies would be directly correlated with the educational assets developed for junior high and high school public school students to improve literacy, mathematics, and core skills.

Continuous transdermal alcohol monitoring devices have been created for drunks and other expanded digital devices can replace or supplement human rehabilitation absent the costs of incarceration.  Other alternatives include house arrest, periodic drug testing, work for a public entity, communications monitoring through cell phone and internet surveillance, checking in via video or telephone monitoring with a corrections officer at specific points during a time period, wage garnishment, participation in a more instructor-oriented educational program in a career-oriented directive, and community service.

We conduct all of these programs now, but what we don’t have is a digital infrastructure to reduce the costs in coordinating them on a national level.

How revolutionary would it be to punish a young criminal, with you can either go to jail or you can study to become a mechanic or a truck driver on the government’s dime or be forced to pay for it yourself through a fine-based on income thresholds or by working at a consortium of public service partners?  What is the cost of that person being incarcerated to the public for the length of the educational program?  What is the cost of that person re-offending and being incarcerated for five, ten, twenty-five years? 

Compare the tax input the person could make as a truck driver or a chef at options like New Orleans Café Reconcile, less the educational expense the public put into him over the potential time frame of correction?  If the offender demonstrates the desire to re-habilitate themselves in the direction of self-sufficiency, we can combat crime more effectively by utilizing logic and a consideration of all the negative externalities to the general public incarceration causes and letting go of our blood-lust for vengeance against the criminal.  We can stop bullshitting and start rehabilitating if we fund rehabilitation commensurately.  What is justice, but a remorseful redemption towards honest reformation in the heart of the fallible?

In Louisiana, at Angola Penitentiary Warden Berle Cane has worked with criminal district judges in Louisiana to implement training programs in subjects like automotive repair to make prisoners ASC certified, by fostering an acknowledgement of the prisoner’s common humanity.  There is a moral rehabilitation that moves away from cages and into pages of thought and context. 

Some of the greatest advocates to lead these programs are life-sentenced prisoners who can work with the revolving bottom-rung who have a chance to get back into society and utilize these skills.  This gives purpose to the lifers and provides a paternal-type role with some of the younger guys towards a sense of reform.  Often prisoners have only learned violence and never morality, but salvaging humanity is the key to break cycles of crime.  Humanity will segregate one set of prisoners to elevate above the incarcerated equivalent of damnation the other’s will descend into a path beyond redemption.

We need to design the opportunity for prisoners to opt into programs for a mutually-beneficial path to both the prisoner and the taxpayer.  Prisoners or parolees could make or package clothing or supplies for the U.S. Army and other governmental agencies.  We could implement similar inspection processes as any other plant under the oversight of non-prisoners willing to work in that environment.  The key is treating the workers with human dignity both physically and financially by allocating earned resources to external tax-filed dependents or into an account available upon release. 

We could put the money into home equity down-payment accounts for the dependents or spouse of the prisoner or the prisoner as an individual.  We can also fund modified retirement accounts in a similar manner.  These restrictions allow for the government to provide an incentive while also not confusing the financial benefits of in-prison labor with out-of-prison labor.

We can continue to motivate prisoners to potentially reduce their sentence and continue to qualify for benefits to lead to a path of redemption.  Concurrently we can provide a path away from interaction with the most evil and violent offenders.  We would segment the redeemable from the lost causes in an organized format initiated by the prisoner and not the prison warden.  That is beneficial to society as a whole.  This correlates back to the power of user-driven data and input, similar to Facebook; harnessing the will of the prisoner to make the prison experience better is key.

Prisoners do manufacture goods in prisons today and there have been plenty of accusations of private prisons treating prisoners in this role as slaves.  If such a manufacturing process were proliferated it would probably be less-susceptible to fraud, abuse, and accusations of “enslaving” prisoners if the manufacturing process was run by the government rather than a private prison corporation. 

American taxpayers pay for the prisoners food, clothing, housing, and healthcare and in partial compensation for those costs the prisoner is required to work to avoid a greater reduction in their personal privileges such as watching television, making telephone calls, or the use of a basketball court.  If we could restrict the goods created to products, which are currently purchased for the government under government contracts now such as police, fire, public works, sanitation, recreation, defense and education departments, the conflict of interest of an imputed profit would be mitigated.  Items such as office supplies, uniforms, computer components, call centers, website maintenance, automotive repair, theoretically could all be coordinated with prison labor in secure facilities if the macro-level assurances reduced overall costs to the taxpayers, while rehabilitating salvageable prisoners in a human paradigm.  America could also focus on goods from industries America currently imports with a large trade deficit.

However, most concepts for labor are inefficient and focusing on educational and work skills for the prisoner to reduce recidivism is a better use of taxpayer dollars than subsidized “profit” for the government that a profit sector contract could produce more efficiently.  The manufacturing is possible, but probably only feasible in aggregating low-risk prisoners in consolidated areas on a national level that is to the mutual benefit of the prisoner and the taxpayer.  America could create many specialized prisons centered around divergent production facilities where violations equal expulsion to a more traditional hardened prison environment.

Inside the system a further-adapted educational surrogate program to operate inside prison could be used to increase skills in career areas such as automobile repair, agriculture, manufacturing or retail sales.  Teachers could be hired and appear via recorded teleconferencing for practical and safety reasons to instruct prisoners on skills.  Some of the same pre-recorded educational programs created for the traditional education system could be utilized in prison to improve literacy and mathematics skills.  Assets similar to the Khan Academy videos in a wide range of subject matters could do wonders to fill time.

Utilizing pre-recorded instruction eliminates the physical threat against the instructor and allows for the same lesson to be taught over an over again to either individuals or small groups without incurring marginal increases in cost to the American taxpayer as the videos are played throughout the halls of every prison in America as one of the prisoner’s only outlets to boredom.

We need to stand up to the weaker end of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and acknowledge that just as we put the individual rights of a pregnant woman above that of her child and the child’s father, there are choices and priorities we make as a society.  We need to be able to make a decision and move on.  Prisoners should not have more rights than the average American or the average American soldier overseas.  The majority of prisoners should also not be treated as animals in a stockyard.  There is an effective and moral median.

We can not allow a system of entitlements to prisoners of satellite television and commercial meals, of visitation for all, of social interaction for all, of not having to work, of exaggerating what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, of what sort of clothes you get the privilege to wear, of how much you get to see the sun, access to cigarettes, access to world outside concrete.  Prisoner’s lives should not also be under constant threat because gangs out-power the guards.

Prisons should not have commissaries full of Hostess and Frito Lay products.  Prisoners should not have accounts to buy items in jail.  No one needs Doritos.  How much sense does it make to give prisoners weight-lifting equipment to bulk up, while in jail?  Jog in place.  Do sit-ups.  Why should any prisoner in America have access to even one cigarette?  Is there a constitutional right to smoke?  I know there are tobacco-free correctional facilities.  Weight lifting and Twinkies are contradictory objectives.

Why do so many prisoners have access to telephones to create a billion-dollar exploitation industry of phone calls from prison? Why do prisoners have radios or dayrooms with televisions playing random information reality or daytime television?  These are all optional privileges not rights, which should be manipulated on a facility basis to import and export prisoners based on their level of reformation and compliance.  A one-size fits all state-based system neuters the taxpayer’s power to achieve the primary objective of prison to improve public safety.  (Note I did not say to punish the prisoner.)

War in the Mind

Boredom is the greatest weapon against the nation of immediate gratification.  Our prisons need to learn how to use boredom as the ultimate deterrent to being in jail. These tangible freedoms granted inside of a prison system can be manipulated on a facility basis to coordinate the punishment to the crime. 

What if instead of television the monitors broadcasted educational programs coordinated with the Department of Education, Kahn-Academy-type videos as mentioned earlier, or a series of fading-in and fading-out messages about crime statistics, consequences of crime, principles of Gandhi, Martin King, Abraham Lincoln, Mandela, Einstein, or any number of the world’s thinkers based on approved state or federal boards as long as the messages were not overtly religious?  Put the videos on the WeVote website and let the public vote on what is appropriate. 

What about how-to information, or other information supporting ways towards self-sufficiency available to the prisoner while inside jail?  Ideas could spread: how to change the oil in a car into how to work at an oil change shop.  Explain the tasks to perform a given career.  Offer videos of humans performing in that career.  Open options.  

What about the realities of true poverty in third-world countries or overseas prisons?  What about lower and higher level prisons across America to show absent and greater freedoms to communicate a constant what could be?  Displaying alternatives can correct many prisoners mentally for far less tax dollars.

If we are to truly integrate a rehabilitation mechanism into the prison system and if we are going to better segregate our prisoners for the level of depravity involved in their personal choice of criminal act and their ability to be salvaged from the coils of that depravity then we need to coordinate the efforts of prisons across this country to specialize in addressing the needs of rehabilitation in a tiered integrated structure that allows the prisoner to ascend or descend based on their own choice to rehabilitate.  This way the A.C.L.U. can’t blame taxpayers for the ultimate penalty and imprisoned citizens can rejoin non-prison society with better a better functional skill-set to reduce recidivism.

The Counterweight for the Worst of the Worst

What if the penalty for the worst crimes committed in prison was to be sentenced to a prison functionally isolated?  The prisoner’s family or anyone else was not legally allowed to visit.  There was no hope of parole.  If a person escaped he was miles away from anything except the town where the guards lived.  This would create a consequence for domestic prisoners who effectively said no to every path out of the higher and earlier levels of U.S. imprisonment.

In such a scenario, prisoners would never have interaction with the outside world, none.  You lose all of it.  When you entered you were stripped of everything but your skin and given generic clothing.  You ate one meal a day. (Ask a third world child, how many times a week he eats.)  The sun was only seen through a refracting window, which is like a lot maximum security facilities now.  You now live in a world of bland-generic captivity designed to prevent violent suicide and makeshift weapons.  Lights were on and off when the prison dictated.  You could talk to other prisoners, but there was nothing to read, watch, play, or do beyond what a body provides.

If America voted for it there could also be a contract that if a prisoner attempted to take his own life, the guards would not stop the prisoner unless another person could be harmed in the process.  At some point we have to let go of worrying about everything, under our illusion that we have control, that there is a reason or justice.  Let it be.  Allow voluntary assisted pharmacological suicide for inmates or allow prisoners to use helium tanks and a plastic bag over there head explained by videos who simply wished to commit suicide rather than live in such nothing in order to save taxpayers money and to prevent violent killed-by-guard alternative suicide attempts.  Document the process and the prisoner’s consent on multiple occasions over say a six month period on video for legal reasons.

There is no torture or beatings.  There is twenty-four hour a day digital video recording in every room of the prison as there should be in every prison, even in changing areas and bathrooms.  Prisoners could be tagged with under the skin or ankle-bracelet monitors that activate the camera and identify the prisoner’s location in the facility anywhere outside their personal bunk space.

There are no people visiting, smuggling in drugs or cell phones.  There are no cigarettes.  There is no commissary or money on prison grounds.  Prisoners are forced to cut hair short, even women and have no reading or writing materials of any kind.  There was no workout equipment or exercise yard.  No playing cards or board games.  Prisoners are now official lost in their own thoughts. 

I am against the death penalty, because I believe that killing people who kill people to prove killing people is fundamentally wrong.  But regardless of that argument, I believe the type of people who would commit such crimes would probably fear such stark isolated imprisonment more than death. 

To eliminate abuse in such an isolated environment video monitoring could be broadcast over the internet to the general public and every other prison in America.  Higher-level prisoners could witness the stream to show the American imprisoned world what happens to the descending worst of the worst in our country.  All of America incarcerated and not could see how non-glamorous isolation is, but at the same time demonstrate our civility.  The other prisoners could see these feeds on the video screens of their prisons as a warning of what the alternative is subtle and present in the backdrop of their decision-trees on whether to rehabilitate or to make the choice of isolation. 

Basically the worst of the worst in our country would be put together and segmented from the salvageable.  There would be levels of prisons between the entry and the end level, but the very existence of such stratification and end-game alternative would fundamentally change a prison warden’s threats to a prisoner with a life sentence from empty to consequential in every other prison in America.  The isolation-based facilities could be staffed by more highly-compensated prison guards, voluntary military personnel and form a society to serve that prison. 

The Codification by Age

A significant tool is designing the new stratified prisons could utilize age in the extremes of youth and the elderly.  We have juvenile incarceration facilities now, which in some ways replicate a high school.  I think the greatest value of dollars America could spend to cull the recidivism and creation of life-long lifetime prisoners is to invest in a fleet of prisons that functioned like modified high schools and universities primarily divided by age, but also educational ability and level of violence.  Control the campus and use the power of digital education to catch the young before their ascent into dollar cost for taxpayers and the decent of their self-sufficiency.

For elderly prisoners, America’s demand for vengeance and a perverted sense of justice leaves elderly prisoners stranded in maximum security facilities.  States should be able to coordinate elderly prisoners based on a structure of medical need, likelihood of future violence (not necessarily historical violence, say what they did thirty years ago.)  In many cases these men and women will have no ability for self-sufficiency and would simply default to other forms of tax-payer assistance if released.  Fiscally many of them should probably just be released, but if they are to stay in the system, and particularly considering the aging of the Boomer generation, we must counteract the dispersed inability for the average current prison to care for these anomaly prisoners medical and personal needs as an older human.

We should create the equivalent of prison senior communities and nursing homes.  By aggregating these humans we can reduce cost and save the time of other facilities to address the needs of the average younger prisoner more effectively and efficiently.  To do this we must change state and federal budgeting laws.

In Conclusion

Greater organized segmentation of the prison structure is not a cure-all, but it certainly is a start in the right direction of the average American’s rights to be heard ranking above that of the incarcerated.

The vast majority of prisoners would still be held in traditional or semi-traditional prisoners, but the rates of re-incarceration would gradually diminish as prisoners began to be treated more like human beings with a path of redemption than caged dogs as an unchallengeable standard.  In addition all of the traditional prisons displaying the isolated alternative would be forever changed by the presence of an alternate negative consequence.  Wardens across this country would be able to display broadcasts of the new boredom-based Guantanamo’s like a continually present pendulum of Damocles for in-prison crimes committed by those who view the terms of their sentence as nothing to loose.  We also could close the real Guantanamo and quit holding hypocritical hostages as we condemn Iran.

We also would add a unique element; the choice of the prisoner.  If we strip of man of his free will, his volition in entirety he envelops himself into the inanimate.  By simply prospering the platform of, if you choose this you go here, if that you go there, we set the stage for reform or damnation in the only mind that matters to achieve our goal of increased public safety, the criminal.

There are around 2.3 million people in America’s prisons.  To a large degree we are doing the best we can with what we have based on the scary choices of the worst people in our society.  Allowing prisoners to interact with their families, with mail and visitation leads to better rehabilitation rates, because contact leads to a hope on the outside world.  That hope is a powerful asset in the path of correction, but without a realistic career path for that individual to survive in modern society, the chance of repetitive criminal activity is high. 

Just as in so many areas of our society, with our criminal justice system we have allowed ourselves to be victims of rhetoric.  The elected sheriffs and senators of our country proclaim the benefits of zero-tolerance policies and how nipping crime at its buds and coming down hard shows criminals who the boss is and the massive penalties of crime.  To me this is the same logic as parents who spank their kids as their primary form of discipline.  Spanking is rudimentary quickly understood, adapts behavior in the short-term, but is costly, flawed and incomplete as a long-term behavioral adaptation mechanism because it incorporates external rather than internal rationale for improvement.  This also flushes public safety budgets with taxpayer cash and is the primary accounting mechanism that escalates or debilitating commitment to the failed drug war.

Politicians don the image of the public official who keeps the boogie-man away from constituent’s children at night.  This guise of false security helps the official get re-elected.  It does not actually present or address an honest response to our real issues.  Just like a bad parent who tells her disobedient kid that if he does not get off his ass and clean his room he will be grounded for a month, but then she never really grounds him or just lets him still hang out with who he wants, empty threats tend to encourage rather than discourage negative behavior. 

The root typically plants in the errors or failures of the parents of criminals.  No law will change that.  Maybe humanity, but when our hands are slapped away, when a juvenile delinquent or an adult cuts off his monitoring anklet for the thirteenth time, we need harsher alternatives based on that rejection.

The bread recipe for crime bakes when a person feels that crime is the easiest way to get paid and that person is willing to walk over the rights and freedoms of another member of society to get that compensation.  What is an easier argument to win inside that person’s consciousness to encourage the criminal to reform: to hurt them for hurting someone else (an eye for an eye) or to expose them to a potential alternative to get paid without infringing on the rights of others in a self-sustainable manner?  Alternatively what does greatly diminishing the option of financially profiting through violence by decriminalizing drugs do to that individual’s decision tree?

When we provide the idle mind with nothing, the body produces nothing.  The soul deteriorates into cycles of rage, fear and resentment for who we deem is causing our idleness.  Through the failures of our educational system and the glorification of the lowest common denominator we have created a massive number of human beings who feel a very low level of assimilation into the non-criminal process of viable self-sufficiency in free society.  These people feel helpless at guiding their own life and face a constant internal dilemma of how to achieve a positive self-worth.  The two sides of the sword of our idle mind are our greatest solution and punishment for crime.

Overcrowding is the number one issue facing our prison systems.  Criminals often do not view prison as a deterrent, but rather a mechanism for alleviating their helplessness in non-criminal society.  Prisoners are given “jobs”, roles, and identities in a system that ensures food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare, which alleviates the prisoner from the stress of finding an accepted purpose in non-criminal society. 

Transgressions can be transposed from marks of shame into badges of honor inside the prison walls as measures to ensure a man’s survival inside the concrete box.  Only by addressing the root cause of a lack of purpose or function in non-criminal America will prisoners be incentivized to leave the revolving door of our recidivism-infected prisons, and voluntarily reduce prison overcrowding via the computations inside their brains. 

Hopefully the points previously discussed will prosper intelligent and productive discussion about how we can address that internal dilemma, but the first step is recognizing how essential it is to creating true change.  The second is to replace vengeance with honesty.  I will leave you with these thoughts from C.S. Lewis.

"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.  Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?  If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.  If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.  Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred." C.S. Lewis

The most glaring systematic example of our failure at assisting our enemy towards a mutual-beneficial alternative than unilateral termination is in our prison systems.  We throw away human beings.  We sit back and try to over-simplify criminal activity into the flat blackness Lewis describes to segregate our potential role in doing anything about the blackness in order to retain our moral superiority.

Hopefully one day we will change our laws and penalization systems to segregate those that want to work towards reforming and re-educating themselves in a coordinated effort while enforcing even harsher penalties on those that refuse to work towards a life of self-sufficiency by punishments of isolation and non-physical punishment.  The first step to get there is to maintain a consciousness of our common humanity.