A couple years ago, I was asked by my faith congregation to serve as a volunteer at our local maximum security state prison, offering Sunday services to the inmates. I did so for 3 years. It changed me.
We’re there some truly troubled/warped people there? Yes. Do I kid myself that their “stories” weren’t surely one sided? No.
I was struck by how arbitrary the whole thing is. And how utterly ineffective it is. What troubled me the most is that we have outsourced this whole raft of problems, without sending it overseas. We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. And so we outsource the existence of human lives to an alternate universe that exists right beneath our toes. And we maintain fascinating opinions about these people and their lives, with almost zero insight into what the existence we consigned them to was. When people heard I went to the prison every Sunday to visit with inmates, they would immediately wax their opinion about what it must be like. And I found over time that their imagination did not match my reality. Their can be no empathy in that scenario.
I dream (pointlessly) about a world where a much higher percentage of lay civilians spent volunteer time in prisons. Awareness leads to empathy. And only then when we weren’t outsourcing the issue, we might actually be moved to find something more effective.