I am probably a little late into this and trust me, I am not reading 13 pages worth of posts (I have read a few pages). Yet, I have been completely fascinated lately by the "prison shows" on Netflix so I have pretty much watched everything from Prison wives to solitary confinement. As I first began watching, I could see things they would say that would cause a trigger reaction in me. For example, they'd say something like, "We are treated like we don't matter." And I would counter-reply with, "Well, what do you expect?" (And yes, I realize you are thinking- why is she talking to the tv show). I am a student of human behavior and I am fascinated with why people do what they do or how do people think what they think? I am intrigued by the fact that 1- prisoners can see no empathy on the part of the person they victimized (even if the correlation was pointed out to them) and 2- why we allow a sort of anonymity to prisoners especially those that are predators and violent criminals.
I have been planning out a sort of prison reform for my own curiosity that would increase the productivity of prisoners, completely make prisons undesirable places to want to go to, a reform of prison mentality, a program that would assist prisoners that are non-violent and non-predatory to wipe out first offenses so that they can indeed get jobs and not have to return to criminal behavior to survive, increase the idea that we need to tailor the punishment to the crime and begin letting the criminals SEE what they have done and have to answer to the victim in hopes that it would increase their empathy and therefore change their own mind about their behavior, and bring more self-sufficiency to the prison system in means of doing away with non-essentials.
If we refuse to accept the idea that bad people do not exist then we are not seeing that people have a choice whether to be good or bad. Every day we make decisions to define our paths. Yes, society sometimes creates the "bad" in people by treating them inhumane and giving them what they perceive as no choice but we still choose. If someone goes out of their way to lie, scam, and then hurt you- I am sorry but that person is "bad" and I can assure I have first hand experience of someone that CHOSE to LIE, CHOSE to put his hands on me even though I did nothing to him, and then sat on the stand and lie about it ALL. Although his lies were futile and he was sentenced but in HIS mind- HE was in the RIGHT and I was WRONG because I did not "do as he said" or didn't do it according to HIS standards. So you can decide- is he bad or just perceived as bad. In the eyes of the law, he is not bad but a criminal with a criminal mentality. In my eyes, he is a very bad person and I do pray and I have forgiven, I just pray to God he does change so NO one else ever has to be victimized by him ever again.
And to finish my point, the more I watched the shows, the more empathy I began to feel for some of the people there. The solitary confinement was probably the worst show of all. Even as an introvert, I would be devastated to be stuck in a place like that and have NO human contact for years. The problem is this, our justice system is crap and what we've been doing is not working. More people tend to be going "bad" and then justifying their actions by splitting hairs. It can't be both ways, it can't be good and bad, nor right and wrong, it is not always black and white but we can't say people are not bad but then get mad when something "bad" happens to us that was caused by another human being that had free-will and a mind to think about the choices they were about to make. So to sum it up, we can't justify anything. We are known by our fruits, and we can't justify that in any manner.
