Monday, September 12, 2005
Wow man, being a 5th-year senior sucks. Back in high school when I was picked on as the new immigrant kid (Bully-type kid: "Hey, do you know that hats are not allowed on school premises. School policy." Me: (out loud) "Yes." (inaudible) It's a headscarf, not a hat, dumbass.), I used to hope that someday a) some of these kids end up in prison, and b) I get to do some bullying of my own, God willing. But now, seeing the new breed of freshmen and sophomores studying campus maps and looking helpless and prepubescent evokes every goddamn motherly instinct in me. Come, little ones, let me show you around campus and introduce you to the mass cults of college life (namely, the facebook and The Da Vinci Code).
I like my internship at the jail. I'll be teaching a resume-writing class every week and working on some other projects, doing caseworker-type things. Many of the inmates are surprisingly upbeat. The sad part is that the proverbial revolving door is a reality for many of these people. When you have a guy who can't spell the name of his apartment building or street and has an eight-page record of driving offenses and fines which anyone can tell he won't be able to pay, something tells me simply incarcerating him is not going to solve the problem. Seeing the human face of the problem up close has gotten me all riled up again. Granted, I have what some would consider an extremely liberal stance on crime in general, but we seriously need to start addressing the root causes of crime instead of exacerbating them by putting people behind bars. At the very least we need to rethink our categorization of crimes and the penalties we currently use. Is growing marijuana for personal use a serious enough reason to put someone in prison for more than a decade and strip them of their voting rights after they've served time? Social contract my ass.
I would still be delighted to run into one of those high school bully kids at the Ramsey County workhouse, though. It's not prison, but it'll do.
I like my internship at the jail. I'll be teaching a resume-writing class every week and working on some other projects, doing caseworker-type things. Many of the inmates are surprisingly upbeat. The sad part is that the proverbial revolving door is a reality for many of these people. When you have a guy who can't spell the name of his apartment building or street and has an eight-page record of driving offenses and fines which anyone can tell he won't be able to pay, something tells me simply incarcerating him is not going to solve the problem. Seeing the human face of the problem up close has gotten me all riled up again. Granted, I have what some would consider an extremely liberal stance on crime in general, but we seriously need to start addressing the root causes of crime instead of exacerbating them by putting people behind bars. At the very least we need to rethink our categorization of crimes and the penalties we currently use. Is growing marijuana for personal use a serious enough reason to put someone in prison for more than a decade and strip them of their voting rights after they've served time? Social contract my ass.
I would still be delighted to run into one of those high school bully kids at the Ramsey County workhouse, though. It's not prison, but it'll do.
