re: #253 Decatur Deb

Sounds like a really well-thought-out system. And he’s probably not too far from the mainstream for someone who once enters it. Now think of the 14-yr old who shows up in jail with facial scars from where he’s been kept chained to a radiator, the kid who took a heavy possession rap for his mother because she had two strikes, or the kid who never showed up on any record in any school for a day. We have a lot of crime because we have developed a machine to make criminals.

I had heard horror stories but didn’t really do any reading/research until it happened to my spouses brother. He was 18 when they tossed him in a max facility and in less than a week they had knocked out his teeth and tore off his ear. You don’t need a very good imagination to know why the teeth were knocked out right away. He wasn’t a violent person up to that point. A few years later (after he had grown a couple inches and gained about 30 lbs)…they charged him with stabbing another inmate 27 times. He never talks about it but my guess is it was a “paybacks are a bitch” situation. He has 2 years left. He’ll be almost 34 years old and hasn’t seen the outside of a jail since he was 17.