One of the crazy things on my “Bucket List” is to spend a night in prison. The motto is not to do something crazy which lands me in prison. Rather, its to interact & understand the mentality as well as the situations of a criminal/law-breaker. The reason why a thief stole, why a murderer murdered & why a rapist raped.
I strongly believe that these people are just like you and me. The only difference, they were brought up in the wrong environment. They were taught things in a certain way which they couldn’t understand were considered wrong for & by the society. They were molded in an environment where people don’t understand the pain of other people, other sex or any other creature. When they brutally murder or rape someone, for them it’s not a person with feelings and emotions. For them they are just a breathing object. Think of it, a female gets brutally raped, and we don’t even have the guts to finish reading the news mentioning the details of the rape but there stands the rapist with a big smile on his face. Reason – He has no idea about what he has done & how his actions will ruin someones life forever. They are just doing what they have been taught is right to do.
Why do we go to school? The answer to this question has changed over time. The primary reason is so that we can become a good human who understands the pain, suffering, happiness of others; in short to learn human values. Sadly over time it has changed to just mugging up books and leading the never ending race.
How smartly humans have learnt to blame everything on these people. Whereas the truth is we are all responsible for their condition. We as a society failed to take care of certain people and then we blame them in the name of showing sympathy towards the victims. We also try to kick them out of the society by calling them psychopaths, maniacs, lunatics etc; but in reality they are the victims of a flawed society. A society which is trying to run away from its responsibilities. Nobody is a criminal or a terrorist by birth. A child holding a weapon could have been your father or your brother or for that instance even you if you were brought up in the same environment as the child. Our job is not to punish them, or decide if a rapist has to be brutally mass murdered or should be hanged. Our job is to create a better society for everyone, because if there exists a criminal in the society, we are solely responsible for his existence. We were so busy shouting on roads, social media, proving the courts wrong that we didn’t get time to rebuild their living conditions.
Someone was smart enough to understand this and didn’t write the punishment of death for a person who even commits a murder or a rape. They are not hanged and given a chance to improve themselves while they are taken away from the society to a prison – The place where they are supposed to learn the “right” way of living. A prison should be a lot more different. It should be a place to improve people and uplift them to the standards of the society, more like a rehabilitation center. Sadly, our prisons are a place where people are harassed, looked down upon and live a life equivalent to hell. And then we expect them to be a better human at the end of their prison term.
But there are people who cannot be cured, and after careful considerations, they are sentenced to death. A death sentence is a lot bigger thing than we can ever imagine. By taking away someone’s life we are taking away their chance to improve with their only fault being growing up at the wrong place; which in the first place was never in their hands.
Since there are so many animal lovers in this world, I guess this theory will be easier to understand if explained with the help of an animal. A dog that has been trained to bite everyone he sees will gradually end up biting everyone it sees. People start calling the dog as a mad dog, but is the dog really mad? Or has the dog been doing what it was trained for or has seen other dogs doing all its life. All it has learnt throughout its life is its only reason for living is to bite other people. The dog is not wrong, it has been trained wrong.
A successful adult is the child who was brought up right. There are no good guys or bad guys in this society. There is just healthy environment and unhealthy environment; and thus the product of these environments in the society. You should be happy if you are brought up in a healthy environment, but you should be terribly sad if you die without creating a healthy environment for someone else.
