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| Blogs > Dreamcatcher__ > 奥の細道 (Oku no Hosomichi) |
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Talk About Fucked Up! I was going to post this on Jozz's blog [post 1100681], but I don't want to hijack her blog. I don't really want to post it anyplace, but I guess it goes here, at least until I get tired of looking at it. I used to volunteer with organizations that worked with abused and neglected both in the US and some of the places where I worked overseas. I took on the toughest cases. It was brutal and frustrating despite my ability to decipher the system and occasionally make it work to the ' advantage. Everything was stacked against them. In many cases their best hope was to break loose from their dysfunctional families which confined them in crime-ridden environments, but the laws were written to prevent that. In the US the default option seems to be prison (with 5% of the world's population we have 25% of the world's prisoners). I got a phone call 18 months ago from prison from one of my boys, now a man of 27, asking for help to learn a trade (personal trainer) while he was locked up. It was a sad case. His father had been shot and killed in the street next to an ice-cream truck before the boy was born. When he was 14 I had gotten the court to accept moving him to a boarding school in another state with a full scholarship, but his mother, who was living with a guy who was turning her boys into burglars, vetoed the deal. I checked around and concluded that he was a good bet to change his life, so I financed his training. He started off well after he got out, got a job right away. But he got tied up with a woman with whom he had fathered a before he was put away, and things headed south from there. Soon they broke up and he was homeless. Against my better judgement, I continued to support him financially. Five thousand dollars later he had lost his job in large part due to the interference of the very probation authorities who were supposed to be guiding him. Next thing I knew he had cut off the tracking device they had attached to his ankle and was on the run. He couldn't support himself with their constant bumbling and harassment and his own inability to make good decisions: like renting a stolen car off of Craig's list and getting arrested while job hunting in a city 100 miles away where he hoped to be able to make a new start in a safer environment for possession of stolen property, then getting jumped and robbed by the same gang that had burned down his grandmother's house while he was heading to the train station to appear for his stolen property possession hearing. He wouldn't go to the cops. His family is still living in witness protection for testifying against that gang. If it wasn't for bad luck, these young people who get off on the wrong foot wouldn't have any luck at all. |
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You have a big heart for trying to help him. And sadly the system is often not set up to truly help. I have heard individuals who have gotten out say that once out it is far easier to reoffend to get back in. They get 3 squares a day, tv, internet, education or jobs if they wish it. roof over their head and the friendships of their fellow inmates become like family so when they are thrust out into life outside the prison, it is hard, isolated with the feeling of the world is against them.
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This will stay here for a couple of days, then it's coming down. I don't particularly want to start blogging again.
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