The Gate Is Not the End
WE ARE having the right argument about our prisons, but only part of it. The reports are familiar: holding cells crowded beyond capacity, crimes committed inside the very facilities meant to contain crime, a national conversation about whether our institutions reform people or harden them. The proposed answers cluster around the front end: alternative sentencing, […] The post The Gate Is Not the End appeared first on The Namibian .
WE ARE having the right argument about our prisons, but only part of it. The reports are familiar: holding cells crowded beyond capacity, crimes committed inside the very facilities meant to contain crime, a national conversation about whether our institutions reform people or harden them. The proposed answers cluster around the front end: alternative sentencing, community service, keeping petty offenders out.
These are good answers but they only address who walks in. Almost no one talks about what happens when a person walks out. Consider the man who leaves a correctional facility today with everything he owns in a plastic bag.
Within months, the uncomfortable odds are that he will be back. Not because prison is where he wants to be but because it is the only place left with a role for him. While he was inside, the bonds that hold an ordinary life together came apart.
