Culture

In today's prison system there is an epidemic that has amassed a very destructive force and one would be sadly mistaken to shrug it off as being inconsequential to the world outside of prison. We must not turn a blind eye to the fact that the realities in prison, will one day become realities outside of prison.
 

Gangs, violence, and drugs are ravaging our cities and are even more prevalent in our prisons. It is an enemy to the potential success rates of the releasees that re-enter our communities and can have devastating effects on our personal lives. We must change the culture within our prisons to ensure the safety of all we know.
 

The culture inside today's prison system should become of great importance to the world outside of prison, our society. As the years of tough-on-crime have produced the philosophy of locking them up and throwing away the key, Florida has created a society that exemplifies this belief system of unforgiveness.
 

Mass incarceration, (lock them up and throw away the keys) has decimated the hope that incarceration was once meant to bring to society... Prevention and correction. We have failed to remember that a society is best gauged by how it treats its worst.
 

What mass incarceration attempted to invent is what it would unknowingly prevent. For when you take away hope you eliminate faith...and when you eliminate faith you eliminate life...and when you eliminate life you create death.
 

The present prison system has little to no structure at all and predominantly cultivates gangs, violence, and drugs as the everyday norm. Norms that are not discouraged but encouraged as an idle mind are all that the FDC guarantees the "unexceptional offender". They disregard the truth of when an idle mind wanders, pain and destruction are guaranteed to follow.
 

Prison culture provides little to no programs, and for those that are lucky enough to have a reachable release date, there is no real re-entry development. When outside volunteers try to come into the prisons they, more often than not, find their attempt to bring light into the darkest parts of our world not welcomed by the very ones employed to safeguard them.
 

Society-First seeks to get to the underlying reasons for such a growing phenomenon and take affirmative action against them. The idleness in prison (no real rehabilitative opportunities) has cultivated land of negativity where gangs, violence, and drugs flourish. The horror stories that occur in prison have a profound effect on the mind of the incarcerated, and unlike Vegas, what happens in prison doesn't stay in prison.