April 25, 2017 - 16:44
I realized I have all these posts, these notes from weeks past, that I only ever saved to my computer, and not to Serendip. The times indicated at the tops of my posts will be representative of the dates written on those word documents.
March 30th
It seems to me that the prison system extends eternally into society. The grabbing hands of those concrete hallways, as the songwriter who wrote the most significant letter I read while working with BTB puts it, reaches out into communities both before and after members enter the prison system. It’s a for profit industry, not a system of reform. As a child, I viewed prisons as a great big box, there were only a few, and in them lived the worst of the worst. People who were in prisons because if they were ever let out my personal safety would be at risk. However, the majority of people in prisons are there in order to continue to feed and fund the greater prison system. If the money used to fund prisons was used to fund education, or to destigmatize blue color jobs by increasing minimum wage to be above living wage, would we still even need so many prisons. Elain Bartlett went to prison because she sold cocaine, she sold cocaine because she desperately needed the money, she desperately needed the money because the system we all live in refuses to help those in need, in favor of those who no longer want.