Legal Insanity

The legal system we refer to as one of "justice" is actually about retribution. It deals not with making things "right"; it deals only with making people pay, either in money or time. If something were broken, justice would require fixing it or replacing it.  When an item is taken, justice would say to put it back.  If someone is injured, justice demands they be taken care of and healed.  None of these remedies are as complicated or as superficial as the solutions suggested and implemented by our modern version of righting wrongs.  What good is done by building resentment and decreasing the ability to work and/or be productive? How does locking people away from family and friends effect a positive change as a result of the "crime"?  Some wrong has already been done, so how does another wrong make anything better?  There is no benefit to imprisoning citizens and it is not a solution.  At best, it could be said that the prison system, as it should be called, is a temporary fix to a larger problem.  This stop-gap measure should have been abolished years ago and not allowed to continue-and expand to grievous extent-into the 21st Century.  Locking up a small number of truly dangerous individuals for as short a period as possible is the only humane manner to address this problem.  In other, somewhat more civilised countries, it is done that way; even murderers are only kept locked away for a relatively short period.  Further, during their incarceration, they are actually rehabilitated and healed so that they will not re-offend.  The issue goes beyond "bad people" as some would say, and even beyond simple monetary poverty.  This is at heart a problem which stems from our neurotic notions of complete individual responsibility, which has expanded to such an extent that a person is deemed to be of diminished worth if they recognise they need help and ask for it.  We all acknowledge that no one actually "pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps", because even the staunchest believer in individualism drives in a car designed and built by others.  Even these rugged, die-hard foes of community will drink water drilled, purified, and piped to them by others.  No one person-and this includes all of history-does all the things needed to stay alive all on their own and lives within and contributes to a society.  It takes a small band, if not an actual village, to stay alive in the simplest sense of the word.  Some may be wondering what this has to do with law and justice.  It is only in the overpopulated, overcrowded situation that we are currently experiencing in which this could even be contemplated.  At any other time in history, we would value the lives of each individual enough that no one would ever be locked away.  In any other manner of living but this one we would acknowledge our failings as a society to those who suffer and are not given the basic necessities and opportunity to contribute to their community.  It is precisely because we have lost the idea of belonging together, of supporting each other, and of working together.  Only under these conditions could it be acceptable to make different, to "other", people who are truly just like ourselves.  It is only because we treat "them" as competition and as opponents to be beaten that we can justify this sort of behaviour.  If we were to admit that those who are in prisons, jails, detention centers, and labour camps are there solely because we could not accept responsibility for our society, things would be radically different.  We would no longer be able to shun and expel those who made mistakes.  We would have to see that they only did so because we are weak and selfish.  Overwhelmingly, crimes are monetary in nature: theft, mugging, even embezzling.  Next in line are "crimes of passion", spontaneous reactions to a perceived attack on a person's emotional well-being (most often a disrupted intimate relationship).  Addressing these things would be simple, but revolutionary, because they come from disregarding the innate value of each human.  Prisons are just another symptom of the same condition, and until it is treated all these problems will persist.  It is shameful that rather than stand up to our own failings we lock away "criminals".