Sanguine Tenacious Tidings

Crime (Rated E)

Andre the Blog Monkey's Banana Bar / week 3

Category 2:

Prompt: Should criminals be locked up, housed, fed, and clothed at the publics expense or something else?

Criminals vs. the Public

Lots of books are being written about this subject. How accurate are the movie stories about the condition of prisons?

We have a women's prison in a town not far from us. Every once in a while, some news shows up about mistreatment by a prison guard to a prisoner. Usually, the guard is up on charges of some sort.

Once I read about a group of people who were giving prisoners a chance to study the works of William Shakespeare. It was making a change in the way criminals were thinking. who took the study. You really have to make a change in the way people view the world mentally in order to make a complete change in the people or the system. Even though this particular program was actually changing the lives of men in prison. They lost their funding and had to stop the program.

Unfortunately, there are people who won't change. Putting them back on the streets to commit more crimes against the public does not make sense. The money used to house them has to spread into plans to give them a better chance at life outside of a prison.

The public has to be partly responsible for their own safety, with laws, funding, and other responses. The experience they receive inside of the prison system has to be so deeply like the outside world they will be let back into, that they can begin to understand right vs. wrong behavior.

As a country our freedom in a peaceful way has to have responsibility attached.

A minister got me into a writing program. Writing to prisoners. Pen pals in prison. It really was not a good time. Of the three or four I wrote to; only one seemed sincere. The others were interested in trying to have a mail order sexual relationship. I was younger and did not like the manipulative voice of some of the letters, so I did not continue. Some of them dropped the program when they found out they could not get out of the letters, what they wanted.

You have to remember that these people did something bad to someone, either theft, or violence. We do have professional people who are trying to change bad kinds of experience in some prisons.

My dad was against what he called vigilante rule. As I age, I begin to understand what he thought about taking the law into your own hands. The average person does not have enough ability to take time to research some types of problems and decide exactly how to deal with crime. We have narcissists and sociopaths living in our society. They often blame their own ways on innocent people. Police have a responsibility to look into crimes; to sincerely find the real perpetrator.

That is why as a country. in the USA, the states have their laws and systems. Like any other system it has to grow and evolve until the punishment fits the crime.