Forget Regret

I'm in a class now that challenges the way I view the world, people, and life. It's called the Psychology of Incarceration.

It's about more than what can be applied only to people in jail, but it's about how there are certain traits in life that are necessary for our psychological and emotional well being. It's about how sometimes those traits can be distorted for us by our own doing and/or the conditions that we find ourselves in.

In prison, all of these traits are distorted and practically destroyed. The book is an amazing read. It's written by my professor and two other men, but it's more a collection of letters, writing from prisoners, academic entries with facts about prisons and prisoners, and passages from fictional works that are either accurate enough or applicable enough to help. I wish I could provide a link so that you all could buy it, but I can't find any buyable copies on-line. It will show up in Amazon (yick, still boycotting that site, myself) and a few other sites, but none of these sites showed copies available for purchasing. It's called The Psychology of Incarceration: A Distortion of the State of Belonging by Robin Herman, Khalil Osiris, and Tony Villa Sr. for anyone that happens to come across a copy.

There are many passages that have hit me while reading, but I wanted to share this one today.

"America may no longer be the world's leading manufacturer of goods and services, but it certainly is the world's leading manufacturer of murderers." (Jan-Harlan Kristian, "Manufacturing Murderers," Odyssey, Creative Alternatives in Criminal Justice)
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I'm not saying that people who do wrong should be coddled and babied, but we have to create a setting that works and aims to rehabilitate as they pay for what they've done. We don't want to create a setting that merely creates animals. There's no one to blame for how prison has become, by the way. I don't expect people who work at prisons to realize all this and change. There is a frightening ratio of prisoners to correction officers. I'm not sure how changes can be implemented even. There are no easy answers here. The point is the situation is real and happening in the world along with a host of others. It's important to stay informed and acknowledge them, I think. It's really easy to get stuck in your own world and to not even consider what's going on just down the block.

I might talk in a different entry about how any of this can be applied to our own lives, but I had to talk about all of this first. Also, I have to update a character's journal with a passage from the book that reminds me of him.

I have been writing too much in APA format. It's seeped into my blogging even. I should ramble someday about the differences between APA/scientific writing, and the way we're taught all through high school and in English and creative writing classes to write. It would be one hell of a ramble.