re: #347 Flounder

I can’t watch those shows, to me it’s just so horribly sad.

I wish this country would get smart about incarceration. I’m not saying we should treat prisoners like they’re on vacation, but there HAS to be rehabilitation in the equation somewhere. There is a lot of mental illness involved in prison populations that is rarely addressed either. Gang activity is a huge issue too. How gangs end up running prisons shows me that the people working in those places are not at all well trained. Again, we have a societal institution that shouldn’t be for profit or run like a business with short term thinking. Then there’s overcrowding too, and violent offenders placed with non violent ones. We have all these facilities, why can we not separate criminals into catagories keeping violent repeat offenders in the most secure places, creating mental health facility type prisons(with compassionate and educated staff and the proper security for them) and having a bottom tier of prisons for non violent criminals? We need programs not just in prisons but in the communities prisoners are going to be released into.

We always seem to invest the majority of our resources into shit that does more harm than good and ignore investing in our own people and communities. Everything is about profit margins and greed, I personally think our prison system reflects that just about as well as anything else. It’s a symptom of a much larger disease.