I hate the US penal system. I grew up a semi conservative individual. Good guys and bad guys. Three strikes and your out sounded great. Tough on crime. All of that.
A couple years ago, I was asked by my faith congregation to serve as a volunteer at our local maximum security state prison, offering Sunday services to the inmates. I did so for 3 years. It changed me.
We’re there some truly troubled/warped people there? Yes. Do I kid myself that their “stories” weren’t surely one sided? No.
I was struck by how arbitrary the whole thing is. And how utterly ineffective it is. What troubled me the most is that we have outsourced this whole raft of problems, without sending it overseas. We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. And so we outsource the existence of human lives to an alternate universe that exists right beneath our toes. And we maintain fascinating opinions about these people and their lives, with almost zero insight into what the existence we consigned them to was. When people heard I went to the prison every Sunday to visit with inmates, they would immediately wax their opinion about what it must be like. And I found over time that their imagination did not match my reality. Their can be no empathy in that scenario.
I dream (pointlessly) about a world where a much higher percentage of lay civilians spent volunteer time in prisons. Awareness leads to empathy. And only then when we weren’t outsourcing the issue, we might actually be moved to find something more effective.
I served in the last F-14 squadron, VF-31. When President Bush landed on our carrier (Mission Accomplished!) they had the inferior F-18s in the background for the political shots. We were told that was because the US taxpayers would be pissed if they knew how ripped off they got for the F-18, which was replacing the F-14 in all of the squadrons.
This might be just F-14 bravado, of course, but I do also remember that like the second week of "shock and awe" (the initial Iraq campaign bombing) they stopped all F-14 flights for the same reasons. F-14s were trouncing the sorties of the F-18s, even though we were one squadron vs four or five of their squadrons, because we were the only jets capable of actually reaching Bagdad from the carrier and we were able to convert our bombs to "smart bombs" much faster (F-14s break a lot more so our techs were more skilled).
A couple years ago, I was asked by my faith congregation to serve as a volunteer at our local maximum security state prison, offering Sunday services to the inmates. I did so for 3 years. It changed me.
We’re there some truly troubled/warped people there? Yes. Do I kid myself that their “stories” weren’t surely one sided? No.
I was struck by how arbitrary the whole thing is. And how utterly ineffective it is. What troubled me the most is that we have outsourced this whole raft of problems, without sending it overseas. We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. And so we outsource the existence of human lives to an alternate universe that exists right beneath our toes. And we maintain fascinating opinions about these people and their lives, with almost zero insight into what the existence we consigned them to was. When people heard I went to the prison every Sunday to visit with inmates, they would immediately wax their opinion about what it must be like. And I found over time that their imagination did not match my reality. Their can be no empathy in that scenario.
I dream (pointlessly) about a world where a much higher percentage of lay civilians spent volunteer time in prisons. Awareness leads to empathy. And only then when we weren’t outsourcing the issue, we might actually be moved to find something more effective.