Criminal Justice Reform: Punishment or Rehabilitation
When it comes to criminal justice reform, the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves are we punishing or are we rehabilitating? There’s a big difference between punishment and rehabilitation. Most punishment prohibits or retards rehabilitation, which is why most criminals reoffend. Logically, if they had been rehabilitated, they would not have reoffended.
Putting people in cages and treating them like animals makes people animals, which is why the incarcerated act like animals, but some people were, are, and always will be animals. Criminal justice reform is about the fine balance between punishment and rehabilitation, because if we mistreat [non-animal] criminals, we turn them into animals, and lock up the cognitive animals, so they don’t steal, rape, and murder indefinitely.
Most criminals aren’t evil. They are abuse and neglected, raped and beaten children now adults who haven’t worked out their trauma like the various 12-Step Programs. That’s one aspect. Most prisoners came from broken families and feel like shitty human beings and get tricked into drugs and then stealing and killing for the drugs. We feed our criminals poison. We lock them up in cages. They have no sunlight, no time in nature, no time away from everybody, and the endless benefits of not being a cage. How do you expect them to act?
The fundamental question is rehabilitation versus punishment. Rehabilitation is retraining the mind, so when a person leaves the correctional system they are not labeled felons, and they can vote and own firearms. But if they are not rehabilitated, we get the left’s disastrous policies. Something like hiking the Appalachian Trail once or twice will change a person more efficiently than five or ten years in prison. We should treat most criminals like they’re sick, but we don’t give them pills or drugs or lock them in their cages. They have to workout the neurons in their brains through various methods. But we just can’t let criminals loose, because their uncle raped them and got them hooked to crack.
We label them felons and restrict their employment opportunities, removed their voting and firearm rights, and then we wonder why they repeat offend when the only world these people know is trauma, drugs, and violence. If you call a criminal “criminal,” he’s going to be a criminal like if you call a rapist a rapist or killer a killer. It’s psychological priming and predictive programing. Some people are these things, but most of these people just can’t control their emotions and act out under stress or while intoxicated. Most people you see wondering in the street didn’t have a mom or dad to teach them to wait and look both ways. Democrats do it on purpose, which is why their policies create fatherless, motherless, and parentless children and poorly raised children.
One method is literary shock therapy. Another method is prayer and mediation. But pilgrimage therapy (i.e. thru-hiking from Georgia to Maine) will change a man. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who should be in prison their entire lives. However, we as a society have to decide if we are punishing and or rehabilitating. Me personally, I think we can revolutionize both our mental health and criminal justice reform together. The truth is a lot of people can’t handle the stress of American life. A lot of people can’t handle paying bills and balancing life for a reason. Some people have deaths or break ups and can’t cope. Some people never learn how to live on their own, and people like me have been institutionalized from living in group homes, military school, and the military.
Originally published in The Revolution: