One could go to school, earn a high school equivalency diploma, study college correspondence classes, take vocational classes and learn a trade, take self-improvement programs to learn to be a better person, go to religious services, attend AA, learn how to create works of art to earn spending money through classes in arts and crafts, share relaxed visits on weekends with loved ones, behave themselves, and earn their release on parole. They could go home. Now the emphasis is containment, storage, and warehousing of growing inventories of faceless, psychotropically over-medicated zombie felons. The keys have been thrown away. —Charles Norman, Tomoka Correctional Facility, Daytona Beach, Florida I write because I can’t fly. —Jackie Ruzas, Shawangunk Correctional Facility, Walkill, New York No one ever said it better than the prison writer Fyodor Dostoevsky— to paraphrase: you can measure the level of a civilization by entering its prisons. What does it say about the level of our civilization that we imprison more human beings than any country in the world?
