Rehabilitation and the Federal Prison System: Web Ct Post 10/8/08

Our federal prison systems today are too cluttered with criminals, and what it comes down to are criminals being released even if they aren’t rehabilitated. Our world is entirely corrupted along with our society and to agree with Christian, what purpose would Cops serve if Gang activity were to be kept under control and stopped? I just don’t agree with the notion of Prison systems today failing miserably in an attempt to rehabilitate its felons. I agree with Christian in that I know that our prison systems are immensely crowded and that people are let out to make room for more criminals and therefore allowing the cycle of injustice to continue, but who knows what is true or not, and if the guards and policemen in these systems help in any way to bring these criminals to full rehabilitation. Watching Clockwork Orange for the first time, I was surely surprised and quite uncomfortable at the horrible acts that Alex and his band of brothers committed to these women, and in reading my classmates posts, I am reminded of the movie The Shawshank Redemption, and I can say that I am sure that there are many beings who have been imprisoned that resonate with Morgan Freeman’s character, therefore whose to say that those incarcerated individuals are in any way failed miserably by the system? Some of them perhaps do not wish to be rehabilitated for the simple fear of when the time comes and they are eligible for parole, they might fear what has become of life on the outside, at least within those bars they have a purpose and a place to exist within the confines of whatever individual stature they have earned and accepted. There’s a scene in the movie when Freeman’s character meets with the parole board and they ask him, after having served 40 years of his life sentence, if he feels ready to rejoin society, and he simply answers profoundly,
“What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time, because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit. “
They grant him the seal of having been rehabilitated and then send him packing. I am sure that few, if any, experience epiphanies like this in prison, and so I truly believe that besides all the bad that our corrupt system and its leaders afflict on to the lives of those already corrupted by the powers that be, there has to be a few who actually give a damn, and wish to help those in dire need of some positive direction, outside of the prison cell, and amongst the cruel class of the social order.