My Response to Scottie's Post

Hello All;
  Scottie asked me to give response to his post about profiteering on the backs of prisoners, both in the form of phone calls and rehab/half-way houses.  Link #1  Link #2   Well, being the jerk that I am, I can't just give a simple response to a simple question.  Of course, the actions noted are obscene.  But, I think there is more to the tale;I think that's where we come to the concept of Forgiveness.
  And, there is a lot to forgive.  You see, there is a certain degree of crime in any society.  It's actually NORMAL.  Not in that it is normal for people to hurt others, but that in any society a certain percentage of the population will break the rules.  The question for any society is what they will do with the people who break their rules.

There is no doubt that the prison population in America has gone up steeply over the last number of years.  In a great part, it is in response to laws that incarcerate people for longer sentences.  Did the rules significantly change?  No, only the consequence for breaking that rule.  Did the change in the consequence for breaking the rule have any significant change in the frequency for breaking the rule?  Ah, now that's the question.  What it did do was create an incredible amount of people in prison, a considerable drag on the productivity of those who now sit in jail cells, not to mention the similar cost of those who must now watch over those who are not allowed to care for themselves.  Staggering numbers of men, women, even children, now behind bars.  Freedom lost in the land of the free, seems somehow a horrible irony.  Incarceration rates are climbing, sentence lengths are climbing, and after prison consequences are becoming more and more onerous.
  I have a number of people working for me who are "ex-cons".  One just got out of prison, and is so very desperately glad to have a job.  Keeps calling me "sir".  With sweat running down his face and hands clenched so tight the blood had fled from them, he began to tell me why he had an electronic tether on his leg.  I told him I didn't care... had to cut him off.  Not my place to judge.  "Come to work on time, do your best to do good work, be good to the people you are working with, and we will get along just fine".  That grown man nearly cried.
  We have somehow become this "Christian Country", if you believe the hype, but despite judging and prosecuting someone for their mistakes and crimes, despite placing them in a prison as punishment, we have decided to remove their humanity as well.  Somehow we have convinced ourselves that a criminal is a horrible person from the moment of incarceration until death and no longer worth consideration as a human being who has lost his way and needs to be brought back onto the path.
   What is the result:  These people are so likely to be back in prison because they are unable to cope with the mounting and debilitating costs of being in a society that places harsher expectations upon those least able to meet them.  But, it's acceptable because these are dirty criminals who deserve any smack in the head that comes their way.  The continuing financial ruin visited upon them, their family, it's somehow justified.
  Is it any wonder we allow some corporations to profit in the most obscene manner upon their misfortune?  We Americans who decided slavery was ok because those were not really people.  We Americans who decided that wholesale butchery of the Native Peoples and stealing their lands was acceptable because they were not really people?  Yep, we same Americans who visit back breaking conditions on normal life issues for the men, women, and children who have broken our rules as well as their families who have the misfortune in life to actually love those dirty law breakers.
  We have and will continue to drive our country into bankruptcy one family at a time because we choose vengeance over love, punishment over education, hate over forgiveness.
  So, somehow I have so soon gone astray from my goal of "nothing painful" in this blog.  Well, let me bring it back to my goal.  Forgiveness.  You see, no matter who we are in life, where we go, we are going to feel hurt.  Pain is a part of life just as joy, and often tells us more than the best gentle nudge or word of loving warning.  Just as the child who falls from his bike may cry from the pain, he has to decide now what to do with himself laying there on the ground.  Does he walk away from the joys inherent in riding his bike, or does he take the pain as a learning tool and with skinned knee jump back on that bike and try it again?  So too must we as a nation look at those people who fall and determine if they are to be walked away from or if we are going to give them love and understanding, a bit of hope and opportunity for change.
  The simple fact is, as a people and as a person, growth is rarely pretty.  It comes with boo-boo's, it comes with mistakes, it comes with the normalcy of screwing up really bad.
  But, that's ok.  It's who we are.  We are going to screw up.  As a person, I screwed up, a lot, and I bet you did too.  Even better, I bet your screw ups were different than mine, but I also bet we screwed up the same things a lot, too.
Lovingly, then, if I have made horrible mistakes, and you have made mistakes, and others have made mistakes and we are all human, why do we accept the abuses of those who wish to profit from those very human mistakes?  Seems down right criminal.