I’m angry. I’m really fucking angry. Want to know why? I am angry that millions are exploited every day. I am angry for the thousands of lives ruined every month. I am angry with the mindset that has developed in the general public that makes us think that we are better than an entire group of people. And I am angry with the United States Justice System.
The United States Justice System is putting thousands of human beings into a confined area for the rest of their life. People are told every year that they must spend the rest of their entire life paying for one mistake they made. Now I have thought of this concept for quite some time and the more I think about it, the less I understand it. One action, one mistake, can dictate your entire life.
I’m not gonna lie, I have stolen food before; right from under the cashier’s nose. I simply did it because the idea of paying the insane price for a tiny candy bar seemed unnecessary. So does that make me a thief? Am I a thief for one action? Am I a thief for one moment that I said screw the law and took matters into my own hands? I do not think so. Yes I have stolen, but I will never identify as a thief.
I write about this act of defying the law because I see a disconnect from common sense and our justice system. By stealing once, I am debatably not a thief, yet if I kill once, then I am definitely a murderer. Sure, you can get away with self-defense because your hand was forced, but if you do it in cold blood then people see you as a killer. Yet I stole with little motive and my actions do not define me.
Now do not get me wrong, I understand that murder is a lot worse than stealing. I would never try to say otherwise. As a society we typically value lives a lot more than we do to inanimate objects. So yes, of course murder is terrible, but why must it define someone. Why must one action, one wrongdoing, define a person and force them into a situation they have no control over? How does ending their life early help bring back the people they killed?
One can say that they deserve such an ending because of what they did, that they deserve death. I believe that the narrative is looking at this question from the opposite direction. I think instead you should ask yourself, do you deserve to kill? Do you deserve the right to systematically end someone’s life early? Do you feel a world where people are killed in an organized manner is better than an unorganized one?
And do not forget what you agree to when you state someone’s life has no right to continue. You are enforcing a permanent action that has untold consequences to the people physically and mentally close to this individual. Not to mention that one-ninth (take a second to think about how large one-ninth. 11% Just let that sink in for a moment) of people put on death row are later found innocent… can you believe that? I barely can. In other words, one-ninth of people are systematically sentenced to death for something they did not do (Stevenson, 2012).
So why does this mindset exist in the United States? Why do we feel the need for vengeance? Why do we feel okay to sentence people to death, yet could never imagine shooting someone? I honestly do not know, yet I do have a scary guess. That guess is that our mindset is exactly what our justice system has wanted, and maybe even taught, us to believe. This scares me because it makes sense.
Our government has a very capitalist/corporatist economy. This economic category explains the high amount of government influence from large companies. Dozens of companies profit from and exploit prisoners every day. Companies like the Corizon and Global Tel* Link together take home over six hundred million dollars of revenue annually from prison contracts alone. These companies are making millions of dollars every year off of people who work for pennies… in the past, this was called slavery.
And don’t think that only shady companies take advantage of these imprisoned people. In the 1990s Victoria’s Secret exploited thirty-five female inmates to sew lingerie. Exmark, a Microsoft subcontractor, took similar action when they discovered how to avoid paying minimum wage, with inmates working for as low as thirty-five cents an hour (Henderson, 2015). Now if this does not scream exploitation then I am clueless to what does.
I suppose the next question is how do we know that the justice system is sanctioning all of this? How do we know the government is not trying to end this as you read my post? We can assume they are not because it helps them. It helps businesses, it helps the economy, it helps citizens flourish. I can also safely assume the government does not care about these inmates because this problem has gotten progressively worse.
In 1972, there were 300,000 jail/prison inmates within the United States. At the time, the United States population was roughly 201 million. This indicates that 0.15 percent of the United States population lived within a cell. Thirty years later, in 2012, the prison/jail population rose to 2.3 million. The United States population as a whole had only risen to 314 million, which indicates that 0.75 percent of its citizens were being forced into a place they simply do not want to be in (Stevenson, 2012). In those thirty years, the prison population has grown to be five times as large, in relation to its population. Now personally I hate skewed statistics, this is why I tried to present the data as fairly as possible. As the United States has grown in size its prison/jail population has grown five times faster. My question is, why?
Why do we not consider just how long a life sentence is? Why do dozens of companies makes millions off of helpless individuals? And why has the number of people without freedom grown five times as fast as the U.S. population? Now I did say I was mad at the United States Justice System, but I do not blame them. I think that we all have our motives and reasons to justify our actions. Because of this mindset, I do not want to end this post by pointing my finger at anyone. Instead, I would like to provide a solution.
My solution is simple, yet would be hard to do in so many ways, regardless I know it is possible. I know this because Germany is already doing it. Germany has implemented a new type of prison system that serves closer to a rehabilitation center rather than confinement. The inmates are not allowed access to the outside world until they have been diagnosed as mentally healthy individuals. Every “cell” is cozy and provides a feeling of warmth for the inmates. Each inmate is provided with a therapist in an attempt to work through whatever mental illness/distress that the individual is going through.
The purpose of this is to help the prisoners, rather than hurt them. This policy is to help each individual with whatever problems they are going through that led them to do such a despicable act. The policy sees criminals as mentally harmed individuals, and regardless of their previous actions, they are treated with care no different than how we would help someone going through any other mental illness.
Now you may be thinking, “well Jake, they don’t deserve such good treatment, they are criminals.” Here is the thing, in my opinion just about everyone is or was a criminal, it just depends on where you were born. Who does not drive at least five miles per hour faster than the speed limit? Who did not at least sip an alcoholic beverage before the law gave the thumbs up? I mean come on, who hasn’t broken the law at least once? I would say, and I would hope, zero.
Depending on your environment and a million other factors, that one and done type deal could have snowballed in something much more. People who smoke pot in the slums of New York City run a much higher risk of being caught and serving time than people in the upstate region of that same state. The reason is simply that the war on drugs is not happening in little towns like Glens Falls, it is happening in the depths of Queens. Same crime, but different outcomes.
I believe once criminals are seen as the unlucky ones in society, rather than the villains of society, our world will be a much healthier place to live. My solution is to rehabilitate these people because although their actions were terrible, it is still redeemable.
If someone we care about is depressed we would treat them with kindness and try to fix their illness. This reaction involves human beings understanding one’s pain and taking action to minimize it. I believe it takes a lot of mental illness/distress to be a murderer, so we should treat these individuals as human beings nonetheless.
Criminals are humans. They are alive and they feel pain just as anyone else does. I know sometimes it is hard to see the good in someone because of how they wronged you, but deep down you have to try to see their pain as well. Deep down you should try to see the best in them and through our process of rehabilitation, we can try to make that desire a reality. A world where we systematically help heal people rather than kill them is a world I would like to live in.
Work Cited
Henderson, Alex. “9 Surprising Industries Profiting Handsomely from America’s Insane Justice System.” Alternet, 18 Feb. 2015, 8:17 am, www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/9-surprising-industries-profiting-handsomely-americas-insane-prison-system.
Stevenson, B.(2012). Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice/up-next