From the Archives: Time. And Creating Value.

To take the time to create is to exist. Time is the most precious commodity, yet not for sale at any price, as any octogerian billionaire can attest to. Prison, however, is structured to facilitate the wholesale genocide of time!

Twin TVs blare into a morally and intellectually destitute dayroom for an average of 116 mind-sapping hours a week, while only a handful of inmates can get access to the library for one paltry hour a week (which, ironically, is hardly a haven, as it’s stocked primarily with sill “pop” novels)!

The jobs available for inmates are all wastes of time, menial in such an absolute sense as the render an inmate’s creative faculties impotent after so many years of exposure. Yet to allow an inmate to create value is the perfect form of rehabilitation! To create value is to fulfill one’s existential purpose.

To fulfill one’s existential purpose is to be sure of one’s self worth. When one’s self is worth something, he realizes fundamentally that others are either worth something, or have the capacity to be worth something. Then, concepts such as virtue and morality will be realized, and the inmate will never again be able to steal value from others (which is all, in one way or another, any crime is).

Prison shouldn’t be a place to “serve” time or “do” time; but one to “use” time. It should be a place of many levels, where those who are finding their sense of self worth ascend to a level more academic, and more like life. As one ascends, more and more external stimuli will be provided to facilitate one in his quest to find out how he can create value, preferably in a venue in which he is the best (or at least unabashedly feels so).

But, the sad fact is that prison is a place where one easily kills time, and effortlessly and instinctually detracts value. Many times, I daresay, a promising yet misguided young man will come to prison, and while incarcerated, become indoctrinated and primed in these wretched anti-values. When he gets out, and subsequently robs a convenience store, by golly it looks like the system was right in incarcerating him in the first place!

And so the social cancer spreads. What a disturbing paradox…

I’ve evaded becoming an agent in this process, partially via my unwavering and acrimonious rejection of all this place is. This rejection has, in fact, become part of my persona. But, others haven’t been so adept at grappling for the elusive stimuli that I’ve exploited. To assist them is to cure this social cancer that is pyramiding exponentially. Just check the trends.