Doing Time
"I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world."
— William Shakespeare
How many people live in traps which they cannot see, or which they accept or rationalize? How many people just play out the cards dealt them in this life, thinking there isn't any more to life than this? How many people ever suspect they are living in a prison world for the soul or spirit, which is designed to acquaint them to evil and to remove them from Light?
Of course, there are actual penitentiaries, for the "penitent." But, how many are actually freed from evil or wrongdoing? Prisons are full of people who did not know better, who did not know how to escape the traps of evil, drugs, abuse, poverty, injustice, or ignorance. They are full of people who are illiterate, who had no real chance in life. But, then, how many of us have a real "chance" in life; how many get out of this alive? Life on planet Earth is a death sentence; the only question is, how long is the sentence, and what will be the means of execution? Who in this world is not waiting on "death row"? Doesn't this give you a bit more compassion for those, who, "there but for fortune, go your or I"?
We are all doing time in this physical world. Everyone lives within their own prison, here, if not a physical one than one of the mind, perhaps. And, there are prisons even within this prison world. All prison systems are efficient energy extractors for Evil, with internal systems of violence, exploitation, and abuse which ensure more suffering for the less evil. Rehabilitation is minimal, suffering maximal, on purpose. Prison is Hell. It does not deter crime but has the opposite effect. It trains criminals. And, the way it treats human beings — with total dehumanization and crushing of their spirits — is even more telling about our society.
People in prison are often those who have never learned how to protect themselves from evil or wrongdoing, and as a result, put that on others. Then they are sent someplace where there is more evil, away from the Light, and somehow are expected to learn their lessons and get better? The stark reality of prison life is an appropriate metaphor for what many people experience living on Earth.
It is one of the great myths of society that the good people are sleeping in their homes while the bad ones are in jail. There are a lot of good people in the institutions of prisons and mental hospitals. And, no matter how many people are warehoused in prison, the crime rate does not go down. Prison is not the solution. Jessica Mitford noted in her book Kind and Usual Punishment: "It is surprising to learn that prison as a place of confinement for the ordinary lawbreaker is less than 200 years old, an institution of purely American origin, conceived by its inventors as a noble humanitarian reform befitting an Age of Enlightenment in the aftermath of a revolution against ancient tyrannies. There had, of course, been prisons and dungeons of sorts for centuries; but these were reserved for persons of quality, state prisoners, the prince, queen, statesmen who had fallen afoul of the reigning monarch, the philosopher, mathematician, religious heretic suspected of harboring dangerous or subversive ideas." The first religionist-inspired attempts at confining a person to a solitary cell "with only the Bible for company" expected the person would "in the course of time be brought to penitence for his sins and thus to eternal salvation." But, this made people insane rather than penitent. So, corporal punishments took over; they "flourished and proliferated behind the walls as prison management devised ever more ingenious tortures to enforce discipline and control their charges."
Ensuing attempts to "reform" prisoners were nourished by missionary zeal. "The prisoner, fortunate object of all this Christian solicitude, was to be transformed into a paragon of industry and virtue — according to one mid-nineteenth-century prison enthusiast, everybody could profit from a stretch in the penitentiary: 'Could we all be put on prison fare for the space of two or three generations, the world would ultimately be better for it,' declared the Reverend James B. Finely, chaplain of the Ohio Penitentiary." How is "reforming" accomplished? "Elam Lynds, nineteenth-century warden of Sing Sing, once observed: 'In order to reform a criminal you must first break his spirit.' This is essentially what both prison administrators and a host of well-intentioned reformers have pursued from that day to this, albeit they do not express it in Warden Lynds' forthright fashion, and over the years methods of achieving it have changed." Prisoners are routinely tortured and killed in prisons and jails, to this day, not just in Third World countries but in the US, Australia, and everywhere else. And, in the same way that hospitals cultivate ever-deadlier diseases, prisons foster ever-more deadly criminals. Prison authorities actually encourage and sustain evil prison societies, with all roles in the inmate hierarchy gained completely via violence, pain, sex, suffering, torture, abuse, and access to weapons and drugs (most often sold by the guards). The warden and guards guarantee that inmates, when released, are indoctrinated in: might makes right, and the strong survive by exploiting the weak. Is it any wonder that prisoners are not "rehabilitated" and often wind up right back in prison soon after released? The system is intentionally making more work for itself.
It is almost beyond belief that a human being could be expected to be "rehabilitated" by means of pain, suffering, and exploitation. Yet, this is a fundamental premise of the prison system — and life, according to religious interpretation. It is becoming obvious for all to see that the prison system only hardens people in their aberrant behavior; it does absolutely nothing to "reform" people, or to "correct" their behavior. Prisoners, and prisons, simply equals money. Prisoners also suffer and die in sanctioned programs such as medical experimentation performed by drug companies. Inmates are considered cheaper than chimpanzees. "There is something for everybody in the prison research studies. The drug companies, operating through private physicians with access to the prisons, can buy human subjects... They can conduct experiments on prisoners that would not be sanctioned for student subjects at any price because of the degree of risk and pain involved. Guidelines for human experimentation ... are easily disregarded behind prison walls." One medical researcher noted, "If the prisons closed down tomorrow, the pharmaceutical companies would be in one hell of a bind."
In another observation from Ms. Mitford's book, she quotes a woman who said: "For seventeen years I had been driving past the Ohio Penitentiary, asking myself what life could possibly be like behind those gray stone walls, and a question nagged at my mind. Supposing it turned out that dreadful things went on inside: would I be any different than all those 'good Germans' who passed Dachau and Buchenwald and never asked questions? Yet, I am ashamed to confess, it took two riots and at least five deaths to confirm in me the resolve which had been slowly, and so reluctantly, growing within me — to find out what goes on after we condemn a man to the spiritual wastebasket we call the penitentiary." read more ...
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