The overseers
by kate richards o'hare
There is much time for meditation in prison, and much to meditate upon. One is presumed to meditate upon their sins and repent the evil of their ways, but I will never be able to regret that I have taken, and steadfastly maintained, the position that had landed me in the prison and my conscience refused to spite me. So I spend most of the weary, monotonous hours that we were locking liked wild beasts in fetid, disease reeking cells, trying to fathom the dark mysteries of the application of law and morals.
I knew that prisons were social institutions, presumably founded and maintained by society to cure the criminal and criminal ways, and return him to society fit to mingle and share community life. yet when I arrived in prison I found that by the workings of the prison system society commits every crime against the criminal that the criminal is charged with having committed against society.
Prison Writing in 20th-century America, page 85
I knew that prisons were social institutions, presumably founded and maintained by society to cure the criminal and criminal ways, and return him to society fit to mingle and share community life. yet when I arrived in prison I found that by the workings of the prison system society commits every crime against the criminal that the criminal is charged with having committed against society.
Prison Writing in 20th-century America, page 85
Author Kate Richard's O'Hare discusses the immoralities of locking a person up in a prison which is comparatively as bad as the crime committed by the criminal. Prisons have a custodian responsibility to treat prisoners like human being that are a part of a society, because it is the society has made them that way. O'Hare casts the prisoners as victims of a sad story, whilst pardoning prisoner responsibility, arguing that it is the prisoner's who are the victims. However, you can't place all the blame on society and disregard the choices the prisoner made that landed them in prison. Yes, environment shapes a person, but all the blame cannot be places on the system. My take is that it is a broken system containing broken people; both need to be fixed, but in doing so both must claim responsibility.