A man embarks on his long journey back home from the office, a journey that involves an exhausting ride in a jam-packed bus followed by an hour on a speeding train, where he hangs on for dear life to the edge of the train door. Another precarious journey while being packed like a sardine in a tin. He’s undertaken this perilous journey so many times, it’s like second nature to him.
Except today, he finds himself feeling an emotion he hasn’t felt in a while; fear. He has had a bad day at work, having learnt that a slowing economy meant his employer needed to cut costs. It was a decision between letting some of the employees go or giving everyone a substantial pay-cut. He was already struggling to make ends meet with a wife and two children to take care of. The impending doom of losing all or most of his source of income made him acutely aware of how fragile life was.
For the first time, he felt afraid while making his routine, albeit dangerous, journey.
As he hops off the train at his destination and exits the train station, a dimly lit sign titled “Permit Room” catches his attention. It’s a tempting call, one that he cannot ignore. He walks into the dingy establishment and begins to drown his sorrows away with some cheap whiskey.
An hour later, he finds himself staggering up the narrow, disheveled staircase that led to his tiny quarters. Home. Warm food. He was looking forward to it.
He enters the tiny apartment, expecting to be greeted by his wife and the warm aroma of dinner. Instead, he is met with silence. His wife is lying on their little cot with her hand pressed against her forehead. She had been feeling ill and a spinning headache had gotten in the way of her dinner preparations.
In this moment, the angry, stressed and extremely intoxicated man feels an explosion in his mind. He had been looking forward to this meal to help forget the struggles of the day and soak up all the alcohol he had imbibed. All he had now was a spinning head, a growling stomach, and a mind full of worry.
For the first time, he mercilessly beat his wife that night.
A journalist finds himself perched precariously on the ledge of a building situated in the city’s most infamous red-light district. In front of him, separated by a narrow alleyway, is another building with tiny windows. Most of these windows belong to tiny residences for the people who lived and worked in the local shops and establishments. His interest lay in the top floor of this building, which was the hot bed of the area’s brothels. Each window on the top floor was completely blacked out by curtains, except one. This was no accident. He had worked endlessly for weeks, through a network of informants, to ensure that on this particular night, the curtain in the master room would be left half-drawn, just enough to allow his camera lens to zoom in and capture what was meant to occur inside.
An auction of young women, most of them underage, kidnapped against their will. The ringleader of this operation was a local tyrant who had deep connections with politicians and police alike.
He had made it his mission to expose this individual and help liberate these young women.
Little did he know that his double-crossing informants had double-crossed him for fear of their lives. The tyrant’s henchmen crept up behind him.
The next thing he knew, he was falling off the ledge to his death. The auction continued, the world and community around blissfully ignorant. The journalist’s body was only discovered the next day.
A young woman, recently returned from a study-abroad trip, finds herself nervous about the upcoming university exams. Her educational experience abroad was very different, with a focus on absorbing and synthesizing information rather than memorizing content and spitting it out verbatim on paper. She often used cannabis to calm herself, just a little bit to take the edge off when the stress got to her.
During her study-abroad stint, this was never a problem. Cannabis was easily accessible and not considered taboo. She got used to the easy access and like many other misunderstood cannabis users, minded her own business and kept her use restricted to private moments and locations, always mindful of others around her.
She was a functional, well-behaved pot head. One that had gotten used to being able to indulge in her innocent stress-relief ritual.
It was no surprise then, for her to be shocked when she found herself in need for this stress-relief ritual at home without any easy access to cannabis. All she needed was a little bit, but it turned out that she had to undertake a dodgy adventure that involved sneaking through dark alleys and winding pathways of a slum in order to find a suspicious-looking man from whom she could purchase what she needed.
The thought of having to procure what was essentially a plant in such a convoluted and dangerous way irked her. Yet, she followed her male friend’s advice. You are a girl, nothing will happen even if cops show up.
The cops did show up. There was an undercover operation that day. She was apprehended, and when she refused to pay a bribe and instead tried reasoning with the policemen, was thrown into the back of a van and taken into police custody.
All she was trying to do was buy the bud of a plant that grows freely in nature, to take the edge off while she prepared for her exams. She was studying to be a doctor and dreamed of providing her services to the poor and needy.
In the eyes of the law as it is written today, the drunken man, the brothel tyrant and the aspiring doctor, all have committed a crime. In an efficient society, each of them would be reprimanded, tried in a court of law and subjected to corrective action. In most places across the world, the crimes in question almost always call for prison time.
Which begs the question, do all these people belong in prison? Surely, compared to the brothel tyrant, the drunken man’s crime was circumstantial, and compared to them both, the aspiring medical student is a saint who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yet, all of them, in the eyes of the justice system today, belong in prison. A hellish place, without morals, rules or structure. Each of them will be thrown into a system that subjects them to deplorable conditions, inedible food, constant threats to life and an apathetic administration. To be sure, perhaps the brothel tyrant deserves nothing more than to be cast away into this abyss.
But the drunken man can be rehabilitated. The aspiring doctor does not even deserve to be anywhere near a prison.
The point of the prison system should be to rehabilitate those who have sinned in the eyes of society. Rehabilitation means constant education, meditation, and reflection. Instead, criminals are cast into a pit where they are abused, raped, and hurt, often by each other.
Is one expected to emerge from this torturous experience feeling reformed and having atoned for their sins, or do they instead emerge with a greater sense of bitterness and hatred towards society?
Has the purpose of the prison system been met? Or are we funding a complex that serves no purpose other than to elevate the levels of hatred and anger in this world?
Is it better to create an environment that results in severe penance, rather than one that forces material and physical hardship?
There is a special place in hell for those who disregard the well-being and sentiments of others and only act on their own interests. For everyone else, let us create a system that encourages reflection in case of lapses of judgement and reform of errant behavior.
