re: Visited the Angola Rodeo and Craft fair and was amazed what I saw. Can good come from bad?

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"The Creative Brain" on Netflix. It's a 1 hour documentary on how and why humans think creatively.

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Putting it on now.

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It made me second guess my own feelings about incarcerated people who made bad decisions in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure they need to pay their debt to society, but they are not all animals who should be locked in cages (Oh yeah, some are). They can be capable, creative and artistic people; especially when taught properly how to tap into their innate creativity when they've been told otherwise their entire lives.

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I guess the bigger question is, what is the point of incarceration? In particular how it applies to our current penal system.

If it’s to exact primal justice, then make it eye for an eye. Heinous crimes crimes like child molestation, violent rape, cold blooded murder of an innocent...and the evidence has them dead to rights, let them hang swiftly. No sense in a long incarceration. End them.

Something like revenge killing, crime of passion, circumstantial evidence, something that indicates some level of justification or at least doubt in the intentional evil of the crime...maybe these people have a chance at being rehabilitated. Think something like Gary Plauche, or Killing someone that hurt your family...something that indicates a man just being pushed to the edge and snapping.
Someone like that might be salvaged.

If the purpose is truly rehabilitation then the system should strive for that. If you aren’t achieving that in most cases then something isn’t working and should be changed.