AMERICA’S PERMENANT CRIMINAL UNDERCLASS

When I was growing up, we were taught that sometimes decent people make mistakes and commit crimes.  We were also taught that if you make that mistake, or commit a crime that once you paid your debt to society, all was forgiven and you could once again be considered a good citizen.  I remember the days when criminals went to jail and came out in a few years with a GED and if they were there long enough possibly even a college degree.  I’m not really sure how long ago the things that I was taught and observed changed, but they definitely have and we need to to ask ourselves is our society better off today than we were all those years ago?  Our justice system has been converted from a place to rehabilitate criminals to a for profit institution in which there is no incentive to rehabilitate those caught up in the system. 

In my view, we put people in jail and make every effort to ensure that they come out worse off than the day they went in, their only education opportunity these days is in how to come out a better criminal.  In most cases their right to vote is revoked, ensuring that they have no chance of participating in our democracy, yet they have paid their debt.  After we make sure that these folks can’t vote, we have to make sure they continue to commit crimes, so that we continue to feed our for profit justice system by asking if they’ve ever committed a crime on every job application.  If a person has been convicted of a crime they have virtually no chance of finding a decent job once released; so what do they do? They return to a life of crime and continue to feed the monster that is our for profit justice system.

Please understand that I am not now, nor have I ever been soft on crime.  I just think that if we continue to create this permanent criminal underclass, our country will continue to become less and less safe.  While some don’t worry because they see this underclass as mostly minorities of various races, nothing could be further from the truth.  Today the underclass comes in all races, sexes, shapes, and sizes and they are getting younger and younger by the day.  How many times have you watched the news and seen a criminal who looks like he or she should be at a pajama party or ice cream social rather than taking a gun to school or shooting a classmate or perhaps even committing a robbery of some sort? 

For those who think I’ve lost my mind, consider the following; it cost us over 30K per year to keep someone in prison, while the average cost to educate someone is around 9K, so even in the short term, it’s less costly to educate someone than it is to keep them locked up.  There are people that deserve to be locked up and never let out, but more than half of the people labeled felons in our country are low level drug dealers and petty thieves who’ve committed what are widely considered non- violent crimes by law enforcement.

 Given the cost, it makes no sense to continue to punish people like this once they’ve served their time and repaid their debt to society.

I’M JUST SAYIN