The Industrial Penitentiary Complex is Broken

I had this thought the other day... bear with me...

I don't know how one would go about suggesting or recommending something like this, and I know that with our current system of government nothing this good for people would ever become law. But I had this idea...

The American prison system is broken. This is not something to dispute, this is not something to discuss, this is a fact. You can check on Wikipedia, with your local library, or just walk into any prison in the nation and see that this is fact. When you have people sleeping on the floors of their overcrowded cells, revolving door prisons, no discernible rehabilitation system and mandatory life sentences for minor charges, there is clearly something amiss.

I am not offering any kind of immediate solution. I am not an expert on the Industrial Penitentiary Complex, although at this point I would say the people who are experts on that subject are more concerned with the politics of running a profitable business than running a prison. All I am is a guy with an idea. And the idea is this: Educate the prisoners.

Before you go off in your head with all the reasons this wont work, let me finish explaining. The first thing you would need to do is get more teachers. I know, yeah right. Imagine what it would look like if the government ran the prisons and the schools the same way it ran the military. People join the military because it will pay for them to go to school and get an education. What if we took that same principle and applied it across the board in America. Almost like creating another branch of the military except this one will be the Teachers branch.

Say the Government offered to pay for anyone's schooling with one caveat: To earn your bachelors degree you must agree to teach in a prison for a specified length of time after you graduate, say three years. If you wanted to go further with your schooling, Masters or Doctorate, you would need to put in another three years, this time in a public school.

In this new system, when a prisoner gets to prison, one of the first questions they are asked is "what was the last grade completed?" From there they are required to go to class, finish their education, and possibly learn a new trade. Currently the system is set up to fail. You get hundreds and hundreds of men, lock them up together and... and... nothing. They have no dicipline, no organization, no structure, no forward momentum, no alternatives. So naturally, when they are released they are in the exact same situation and their options to avoid getting re-arrested are exactly the same as when they went to prison.

If you educate them, or teach them a trade, when released they have new options available to them. This way "rehabilitation" is not just a word for politicians. It can be something that works. The only prisoner that I have ever known to rehabilitate himself was Stanley "Tookie" Williams. He spent twenty years of his prison sentence writing childrens books on how to stay out of gangs and avoid the mistakes he himself made. And though these books were nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature four times, the state of California executed Mr Williams in 2006.

Of the 304,549,175 people living in this country, 2,299,116 are in prison. Sorry... that was the beginning of 2007, I'm sure we have breached the 3 million mark by now. Here is the point of what I am saying: Something needs to be done. Are we so complacent and otherwise occupied in this country that we cant be bothered to care about these things? Are we really the type of people who say as long as they are locked up I don't care what happens to them.

If you know something is broken, and failing the rest of society, exactly how long do we wait to fix it? Has it gotten to a point that it is unfixable and we are just crossing our fingers and praying that nobody notices? America, WAKE UP.

We have been so distracted for the last thirty years by things and new and improved things, that we have given up our ability to govern ourselves, or evolve and change. Schools and Prisons are both socialist systems like the post office, the fire department and the police. They require attention, from you, from every American.

If we could educate prisoners, inner-city and poor income families will be able to send every child to college for free. Those kids will have jobs when they graduate from college. Jobs that will always be in demand. (I cant ever see us exporting our public schools and prisons to India). Unemployment and drug use would drop among lower income families. Leading to fewer prisoners in the long term.

Like I said... I'm just a guy with an idea... I'm not an expert, but I'm not blind either.