Prison

I was having a conversation with my friend the other day about prison and punishment in general by the government.

At the beginning of the conversation, my point of view was that no one should be locked up. Why lock people up? It promotes hatred, not love. Yes, these people did something wrong, but our reaction shouldn't be to get back at them by locking them up. What we really need to do is find some way to reform them.

Psychologically, sending someone to prison is not an efficient way to teach them wrong from right. You send them to prison for something wrong they originally did, and they spend years not contemplating that thing, but rather being angry and living their life trying to forget that thing they did. It doesn't matter where they are, whether they are locked up or whether they are even taken out of society. What should happen is they should be constantly reminded of what they did. They committed a crime because they did not fully understand the consequences of that crime on others. We need to show them how this is wrong and what they really did. For example, someone who brutally murdered someone. Sending this person to prison will do nothing to them. What we need to do is to make their mind a prison. We need to put their actions into perspective. We should show the perpetrator how they have affected the victim's family and friends. We should show the perpetrator how they have taken a life away from this world, just as if their own family were to die. We need to show this criminal what they did to the world, and their treatment is only done once they understand fully and feel the guilt they should. This guilt is worse than any prison sentence that can be given to them. Living with the full guilt of killing someone will change them. Not only would they never do it again, but they will live day to day with this guilt heavy on their minds.

Putting someone in prison is very...human. We need to go beyond our basic human instincts of punishing someone physically for a crime. Yes, if one of my friends or family members were murdered, I would want to find that person and kill them myself, but this is but a human instinct. This is anger-driven. Too many things in this world are anger-driven. We need to stop and think and realize that what is in the past has already happened. We need to realize that the worst we can do to this person is to make them feel how we feel.