John Jay Roberts
Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court of the United States 1 First St NE, Washington, DC 20543 To The Honorable John Roberts, I have an important question for you. Why are jails being used more for caging people rather than helping people? People are treated as animals. They’re locked up in awful prisons, and most of them are let out without change. Prison isn’t meant to keep people in forever. It’s supposed to be a place of change so they come out a better person. People aren’t understanding the reason we have prisons. Prisons are meant to help better people who have done wrong. Yet people are seeing prison as a place to put, and keep criminals. I’m mailing you this in hopes of better prison reform, why prison isn’t working, and how it could be helped. “Insufficient to encourage prison reform programmes in countries with scarce human and financial resources...”(1) This quote applies to us, but we are a country that has human and financial resources. How come we aren’t pushing hard enough to better our prison reform programs? We need to think about how to reintegrate prisoners in-to our changing society. We need to help them not commit whatever crime they committed again. They would typically commit crimes such as drug dealing, joining gangs, because they come from “predominantly from poorly educated and socio-economically deprived sectors of the general population..”(4), and they need the money to support their family. The typical people locked up are those from broken homes, or bad neighborhoods. They typically come from those areas due to not having money for bail. Hurting those with no money for bail typically causes them an “endless cycle of poverty, marginalization, criminality and imprisonment.”(3) This is why most of the prisoners just go back to prison with the same, or an even worse offense. It’s a never ending cycle for most of the prisoners with no way of getting out. This also affects the prisoners family as they’re probably depending on that person on a source of income, but now they have lost that source of income, and are suffering because of it. “When an income generating member of the family is imprisoned the rest of the family must adjust to this loss of income.” Now this adjustment could be less food on their tables, or less necessities. All of these aren’t taken accounted for when imprisoning someone from an impoverished community. You can say Justice was served, but all that was really served was more hardship for the innocent. By the time the person comes out they’ll need a job, and drug dealing would seem like the best option for them because of the position they’re in. This is what then starts the cycle of hurt. It hurts everybody. We shouldn’t, as a country, want our people to continue to fail. We should want each other to prosper, and be better as a person. We shouldn’t want people to keep falling into a loop of failure. We should want people who leave prison to get back on their feet, and realize where they were wrong. Prison should be a correction center to better one’s self, and not used as a way to show people you the real deal. Prison reform should be improved in America. All the reasons above should be enough to tell you what’s wrong with the prison system. There is so much evidence that shows that prison doesn’t work. We need prison, but we also need people that can help the prisoners better themselves. We need prison reform if we want a change in our country. Sincerely, Jassie Dominguez
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MeI want to see change in our country. I've seen people come out of jail just to go back in for the same, or worse crime. I would always think " why is jail not working?" This is because our prison reform isn't helping, and we need to improve it if we want any change happening in our prisons. |