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Originally Posted by David Sklansky
Sounds like you are saying that if prisons served nutritious healthy foods the extra cost would be more than made up by less healthcare costs. Even more so if they offered some incentive to join and stick with exercise programs. Add in a program where they are encouraged to take some simple STEM classes and they will get out of prison superior to 90% of American white people.
The current system works like this. Take a person that may feel they are and could in reality be disenfranchised, lock them away with no or little programs to adjust their character (environment probably does more character harm than anything), subject them to random violence and intimidation from staff and their peers, then release them after several years with the hope that society is somehow safer.
True story. This story actually makes me mad to this day. Kind of a tangent but anyway.
When I was in Cumberland County jail in New Jersey in the 1990s this kid must of been 95-100 pounds. Country gullible white kid who I spoke to because we were one of about 7 white guys on a pod with 60 people. He told me he was abused by his father daily. Horrible abuse. Locked in closets, beat, I mean unimaginable abuse as a child. He started using drugs as an escape and ended up arrested for breaking in to a house to support his addiction.
Well we were on a pod called the “Terrordome”. It was for ages 16-24. I was there for 9 months and couldn’t tell you how many fights I was in. The white guys were targets until they made themselves too difficult to target. Me and one other white guy from New York fell in to that category. The rest were harassed every single day. The abused kid got it bad. The beatings he took would of made his child hood abuse seem like a walk in the park. He had his jaw broke, put in the infirmary two other times.
He eventually escaped through the duct work. Don’t ask me how but he did. So when he was caught he was charged with escape from a correctional facility which carries a 7 year sentence with no negotiating. It’s mandatory. He did what he had to do for his sanity because the staff turned their head to the violence as long as no one died. From the warden down. The system does not care.
Im sure when he went to state prison he became someone’s *****. It’s almost a guarantee.
This kid has been abused as a kid and now an adult. No one ever treated him like a human being.
That’s a very normal part of incarceration. There’s tons of those kids in there. Hardcore conservative types will say “well he shouldn’t of committed the crime” but when did this kid ever have a shot at normalcy? He coped with the life he was born in to with the resources he had available to him. It’s sad but he’s not unique. Americans in general generalize everything and that includes people that end up in the correctional system. There’s very little compassion or empathy in America.
So yes there should be incentivized programs in prison but not just with health. There’s a benefit to society as a whole to remember that not everyone in prison is a bad person. Many of them are victims themselves.