THE PRISON OF MY DREAM
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russian novelist (1821 - 1881)
My friend James Edoga asked a question in his book “Stop
Ducking The Eagle”
How healthy is our convictions about convicts?
How healthy is our convictions about convicts?
What is our position about prisoners? How concerned are we
for the incarcerated? The answers are entrenched in the inhuman conditions and
potential depleting mistreatment that run and reign behind those huge walls of
most prisons. It seems like once one is convicted of a crime he automatically
loses every right a living person should have by the nations with little or no
respect for human rights, where you have security agents manhandling even the
innocent man on the street as though criminal until proven otherwise. Should
one be unlucky with them you find yourself behind bars though you may be
innocent of charges? Now for the poor state of most prisons, that arrest may
mean a temporal ban on your potentials and talents and a halt to whatever you
are about.
It is common knowledge and an acceptable fact that in incarceration of every many prison cells are great eagle personalities idling and wasting away their great potentials and their prime for crimes they did or did not commit. While crime does not expunge the potentials of a person who commits one, incarceration alone does not make them any better either. Prisons should be not just be run only as an institute for punishments. Rather it should be one that is committed to rehabilitation and reordering perverted potentials and talents; especially when we realize such a perversion is one major wheel that drives crimes.
No one who recognizes his own importance and relevance to the society and is about that significance would want to breach a law and be branded a convict to have his noble pursuit halted much less aborted by incarceration or in some worst cases; death.
I believe a poor self-worth is strongly related to crime. An eagle that is conscious of her soar-nature would prefer and do everything to fly skyward than cage-ward. However, for those perhaps, with low self esteem who already finds themselves in a cage of prison for whatever reasons should not be reduced to ducks nor held in longer than necessary by their keepers. Awaiting trials and pending cases should be expedited. Also, unnecessary adjournments of court should be outlawed from professional practice. Let prisons be revamped into confinements for character rescue and attitude control, rather than a place for people’s potentials imprisonment, as in the case of many prison houses today.
How helpful and transforming it would be our society and world should great institutions of learning can extend their campuses to prisons in order to reclaim misguided great potentials that crime has misled in there. No doubt inmates, most of them, would shade off attitude and grab such opportunity to prove with time, themselves otherwise to the stigma their imprisonment appends.
It is my desire to work and walk through the prisons in
Nigeria and see facilities both educational and recreational that inmates can
utilize to constructively add value to their lives.
I look forward to seeing inmates in prison talking with
confidence and their shoulder’s high of their dreams and the positive things
they want to contribute to the society when release.
What if we stop seeing them as prisoner’s, inmates or
convicts but as transformers, people with dreams and energy that need to be
mentored and guided towards personal and national development.
“When we train a prisoner, we are directly making our society
better and safer”
