© 2009 Ged Murray

I came across and now subscribe to a blog by Pete Brook called simply “Prison Photography”. The blog features photos from many different sources, obviously with a focus on the prison system.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates.

Prison reform has always been a hot button issue for me. Our current system locks people up for absurd amounts of time in some cases. We have absolutely NO focus on rehabilitation in most prison systems. A typical scenario may go like this:

1. A person is an addict and perpetrates a crime to support their addiction.
2. We lock them up for their crime and do not do anything in the way of helping them overcome their addiction.
3. We send them back to the same environment they came from in a worse state than when they arrived in prison.
4. They re-offend and we give them more time.

And we’re surprised by the phenomenon of repeat offenders? As a society we set ourselves up for convicts to fail. Part of this is just laziness and part of it is the culture in our country of seeing in absolutes, black and white, instead of shades of gray.

I’ve met good men who carried around the label of murderer. And I’ve seen preachers who routinely and legally steal money from the less fortunate in the name of God. Things aren’t “good vs. evil” like so many believe and until we realize that we are ALL part of the same whole… then we’ll continue to build more prisons and hold the title of having more of our citizens behind bars than any place in the world.

Now that I got that out… Check it out if this is a subject you’re interested in. Some pretty cool work on Pete’s blog for sure.