Not Revenge, But A Chance to Change

By Sr. Vocata

  There are a lot of people who believe that we should take “An eye for an eye”, but Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye only makes the world blind.” In the same way, we should focus on a prisoner’s rehabilitation as a chance to change, not to enact revenge.

From the moment people wake up in the morning until people fall asleep, everyone faces many choices. Somebody could choose to go to a school, to get a job, and to meet a partner; likewise, somebody else could choose to join a gang, to take drugs, and to commit a homicide. Every result is made by our choice, so the responsibility for the choice force to ourselves, even if we are forced to make some choice under the threat of death. Therefore, incarceration of criminals is the result of their choice, and they must be responsible for their crimes and to the rule of society. I believe that, however, if the purpose of incarceration is just revenge by society, than a prisoner won't learn meaning of the positive role of society. Because of this, we should give them a chance to change their life. Truly, it is the best way to teach them to choose new honest life, not a crime. To choose the right way, it is necessary that we give inmates the physical and mental motivation to inmates to live a new life, and to take the chance to achieve to the best of their ability and to take up their positive role in society. Jeff Smith (2012), who went a prison for 1 year for covering up an election law violation, made a TED Talk about his experience, in prison, he met a lot of brilliant people who were good at business,  and although their spoken words were not academic, their ideas were like lessons in any MBA’s first semester. Most of them wanted to live a new life after release from prison, but in prison, they couldn’t learn skills to help them rich their potential. If we could organize programs to help them succeed we wouldn’t need to expand prisons. For instance, according to the article Fixing America’s Broken Prisons, the proposal, devised by a UCLA team, is to build housing plan for prisoners which could, before their official release, inspire the inmates’ reintegration (The Week, 2015). 

In Korea, recently, there has been a contract between Justice Department and Defense Business Agency for improving the prison’s techniques to help with rehabilitation as well as to reduce the budget for Defense Department personnel  (Korea Correctional Service, 2017). In our congregation, MSC, we have a special ministry for  prisoners. The sister who is in charge of the ministry said, "When I met them, they were such angels. If they had different family or education backgrounds, they might not have been in prison." This story made me convinced that prisoners should have at least one chance to change their life. 

 In sum, there are two ways to deal with prisoners, one is punishment, the other one is rehabilitation. When we make our best effort to rehabilitate prisoners rather than to take revenge on them, it could give hope for the inmates to live a new life.