Thank you for your message. It is a very strong one and for all of us to be aware of. It is easily forgotten when too busy with everything else in life that life itself is precarious and worth cherishing. But you are also describing an American story.
I wish you lived in a country where they do not have life sentences. I'm from a European country where people can indeed get 'life' but that translates into 20 years.
After 20 years, no individual is the same individual they were before, and whatever made folks go off the rails will not happen again. That is, when society as a whole is set up right. I don't think the United States is set up right, and our meager form of democracy is not capable of producing the right society for us all.
In the country where I am from, they closed 19 prisons in the last couple of years because society as a whole has overcome its own imperfections. Its not that people are more perfect there, but society has reached a level where the individual mistakes are not aggravated by society's mistakes.
We have a lot of mistakes in the United States. Education is just the first to mention. It is not readily available to all. Many get second and third rate education. Worst of all is that the political system does not empower the voters to make substantial improvements.
Poverty is wide-spread in the US. The definition of poverty is kept extremely low, so fewer people are counted as living in poverty. Our definition is even below the international standard of poverty (by about one-fifth lower). In the EU, the standard of poverty is one-fifth higher than the international standard. Using the EU definition, one in three people in the US live in poverty. It shows how much money goes toward the top third and the middle third and how little goes to the bottom third.
In this graph I created in 2006 (using nationmaster.com as source), you can see how different systems do deliver different outcomes (indeed statistically significant) to the bottom 10% of their society. The US was sitting at 1.8% of income/consumption back in 2006 for the bottom 10% in society. Definitively not one of the better nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Here you can read about the Gini index, basically the level of inequality each nation put in place, shown in a percentage to express the slant. The US Gini is 45–50% slant, while Sweden as one of the better nations has a Gini of 25–30% slant. To explain it simplistically, Sweden has 25–30 layers, so the people at the bottom layer have 24–29 layers of people above them, each layer doing better than the one below.
In the US, the bottom layer has 44–49 layers of people above them. You can imagine that there is a lot more pressure put on the bottom layers in the US than in Sweden because there are more people above your head.
Or how about female representation. The US performs poorly, and sits in a paltry 76th position on the international chart:
The political system of the US was created in the 18th century and its ancient nature shows. Voters compete with voters for representation, so that means automatically that voters are not as empowered as voters in the nation where I came from (I got here 25 years ago). Over there, every voter is represented. Voters there do not compete with other voters; all get their own representative. The minimum is 99.3% of all voters getting their pick (but that percentage depends on how many seats there are). Here, the minimum is always the same: 50% for the win.
Yes, take responsibility for the action itself for why you ended up in jail with life. But do not feel responsible for everything because this is not a good society for everyone. Many people are not directly empowered by society here and that push-back ends up causing havoc somewhere in society. We live in a nation where the political system contains a lot of divide-and-conquer.
I am not surprised to see people shooting other people, as if the other person is responsible somehow for our society’s failures and therefore need to be shot. I have spoken to many folks in the US and all know there is something substantially wrong with this nation, and no one thinks that they are empowered to do something about it. But they are empowered. Voters can start voting for candidates that want reform of the political system. I do not mean the makeup version with Ranked Choice Voting. I mean the real thing: the real democracy like they have in Sweden, the Netherlands or in Spain. Just start at the local level and at the State level. The US Constitution allows those changes at these levels already, and even seems to prefer them.
I hope you want to continue giving us good advice on how to see ourselves, and that we are brave enough to look into that mirror.
A society that puts some of its people away for life, and then indeed meaning their entire life, that is not a humane society. That harsh society is worth transforming into a more humane society. And that begins with real voter empowerment and removal of winner-take-all, loser-get-nothing.
Good luck exercising your brain power in prison.
I hope my writing interests you, Ross. Let me know what you think.
