Culture

In today's prison system, there is an epidemic that has amassed a very destructive force, and one would be sadly mistaken to shrug it off as being inconsequential to the world outside of prison. We must not turn a blind eye to the fact that the realities in prison will one day become realities outside of prison.

Gangs, violence, and drugs are ravaging our cities, and are even more prevalent in our prisons. It is an enemy to the potential success rates of the releases that re-enter our communities and can have devastating effects on our personal lives. We must change the culture within our prisons to ensure the safety of the culture outside of our prisons.

The culture inside today's prison system should become of great importance to the world outside of prison, and it has been the years of tough-on-crime policies that have produced the philosophy of locking them up and throwing away the key.

Florida has created a society that exemplifies this belief system of unforgiveness, and the fruit that falls from the tree of unforgiveness is only anger, hatred, resentment, bitterness, depression, and fear, and creates festering wounds that never heal.

Mass incarceration, (lock them up and throw away the keys) has decimated the hope that incarceration was once meant to bring to society... correction and PREVENTION. We have failed to remember that a society is best gauged by how it treats its worst.

What mass incarceration attempted to invent is what it would unknowingly prevent, and we failed to see that when we take away hope we eliminate faith... and when we eliminate faith we eliminate life... and when we eliminate life we create death.

The present prison system has little to no structure at all and predominantly cultivates gangs, violence, and drugs as the everyday norm. Norms that are not discouraged, but are encouraged as a system that creates 88,000 idle minds is a system that is set up to generate an evil place... an evil culture.

Though under Secretaries Mark Inch and Ricky Dixon, the FDC has made leaps and bounds in the right direction, there is still a very long way to go.

Those who are doing good within the FDC are the "unexceptional offender".The extraordinary have resolved within themselves to resist the welcoming gravitational pull of the idle mind by acknowledging where idleness wanders pain and destruction are guaranteed to follow.

Prison culture provides little to no programs, and for those that are lucky enough to have a reachable release date, there is no real re-entry development. When outside volunteers try to come into the prisons they, more often than not, find their attempt to bring light into the darkest parts of our world, not welcomed by the very ones employed to safeguard them.

Society-First seeks to get to the underlying reasons for such a growing phenomenon and take affirmative action against them. The idleness in prison (no real rehabilitative opportunities) has cultivated a land of negativity where gangs, violence, and drugs flourish.

It is an undeniable fact that the horror stories that occur in prison have a profound effect on the mind of the incarcerated, and unlike Vegas, what happens in prison doesn't stay in prison.