Responsibility | Your Crime & Society
The main reason why I created this site was "Crime Prevention". There are too many people out there who have had loved ones lives snuffed out, been robbed, mugged, assaulted, raped, and the list goes on and on. Crime has the ability to take an innocent, decent person and destroy their life. It has the power to murder children, and to make children motherless or fatherless. Everyday there is someone murdered and a child who doesn't understand why he has no father anymore. Some where right now as you're reading this a woman is getting raped, a child's innocence is stolen, and a man is getting beaten to near death begging god that he might live long enough to see his family one more time.
Any one who has been the victim of crime knows it devastating effects on their life, and we need to change it. This site is about making that change, it doesn't matter what side of the fence you are on or why. Just that we all meet in the middle, people are affected by this everyday and the reasons why we need to be part of the solution and not part of the problem are bigger then me or you. Put aside your negative feelings of me being an ex-con, and if you can do that you will find I am human much like you.
Then there is the other side to crime, the family and loved ones of the person convicted of a crime. Mothers who lay awake at night as their son or daughter is incarcerated, in pain that only the love of a parent can understand. Families and friends of convicts are often not considered victims, but they go through some of the most torment and shame possible. If the person convicted is a teenager, many in society automatically blame the parents. Most high profile crimes often cause loved ones to be shunned and the subject of local gossip. It hurts and you as family member are often left to suffer alone. There are many self-help groups for victims of a crime but very little for the families of convicts. The shame and the reproach society echoes on us often force us to suffer alone and in silence. Our voice goes unheard as the media machine reports another prison riot, or convict that messed up once he/she was released. We want so desperately to have our loved ones back and home. It is not like you do not understand they made a mistake, you just love them in spite of it. When crime has a face of a loved one it changes the way you look at things. Shame allowed to flourish will only crush your voice, and families and friends of convicted loved ones need a voice as well.
Convicts and the Responsibility You Face
What I am about to tell you is going to be hard for most people who have committed an offence. Committing a crime, and subsequently you are charged and sentenced, and you complete that sentence, does not mean you took responsibility for your crime? NO it does not. It only means you have served or are serving the sentence of the courts. So what is responsibility? What does it mean to "Own your Crime"? I have seen many convicts come and go from prison only to commit another offence and return. Taking reasonability for your actions is the first step to recovery, it is absolutely necessary and you should be at a place where you accept this before you leave prison. In society today it is somewhat fashionable to blame everyone else for our problems. If you cannot accept that you committed a crime and your actions hurt or affected others and yourself you are doomed to repeat your mistakes. You need to face your crime head on; you need to feel the hurt and pain. The blame needs to stop with you, regardless of circumstances you need to take a long hard look at yourself. You cannot be remorseful for something you do not believe was your fault, or accept your part in the crime or what leaded up to it. I recall when I was convicted it was customary in your statement before the judge hands down the sentence to say something, and of course you lawyer instructs you to be apologetic and remorseful. At this point you're usually more concerned with trying to get as little a sentence as possible so your state of mind is just not there, so you do what any good con does, bullshit and act. However over time you need to focus on what lead you to this point, come face to face with the reality of that. A prison sentence can be a time for you to reflect or it can be a time to get caught up in the prison culture and come out worse then when you went in, the choice is yours.
How do you start to do this? How do I change you may ask? It all starts with one conscious decision to embrace change, to say to yourself, I was wrong and I need to accept that I messed up and I am going to find out why I did. You need to ask the question, who am I? The first step is not finding people to help you it is realizing you need it. You first have to realize what you did to yourself before you can comprehend what you did to others. Once that hits you on a profound level you will seek out the people who can help you.
The next step is to work with those people, physiologists, chaplaincy or whatever means are open to you. It is important at this point to work on yourself and understand you will need to be selfish at this point. I do not mean selfish in the sense of what most people think, I mean taking a profound look into your soul and embracing who you really are, the good, the bad and the ugly. Until you can see who you really are in an honest open way and love the person you were, even the appalling parts you will never be able to heal and move on. If you can embrace that, you have embraced the ugly, and it is at this point the ugly fades and the change that is required is born. Over time as you work through it you will develop a conscience, and true remorse and repentance will come. It took me ten years to forgive myself so it is not a microwave process. Your journey cannot be measure by days or hours but in months and years. If you look back over your past you will realize you didn't become a criminal overnight and you won't become a law-abiding citizen over night either.
After a period of time of working on yourself, you will be able to take true responsibility for your crime, and subsequently this is at the point where you will be ready to make it on the outside. I want to make this clear the only responsibility you have to society is to be law abiding, however your responsibility to the victim of your crime goes far beyond; you are obligated to that person or persons. Some of you will say no one got hurt in my crime, well then you need to go back and repeat the above steps. All crime has victims, even if it was as small as shoplifting, or as horrible as rape and murder. If you did hurt someone you also have an obligation to his/her family. I am not saying you should contact them but I am saying you should never put another family through it again.
Society's Responsibility
This is not going to be a catchy topic that puts me in a lot of people's good graces; lucky for me I am not concerned about that. Society has long thought that their responsibility is not necessary and their tax dollars take care of it for the most part and that is as far as it goes. However, just like a convict can do his time and once he/she has served his/her sentence and thinks it is done, they soon realize that kind of thinking only promotes the problem. If you are satisfied that will be the end of it and no more crime will happen, well then thanks for reading this far and you do not need to read anymore. We simply know that is not the case.
So what more needs to be done? That is the question you are most likely asking yourself now, if I were you, without any prior knowledge of this. However the question needs to be, what can I do? It has been long thought that convicts or people who commit such acts are not human or somehow much different then you. I will agree there are small percentages that are over the top, and cannot be reached by mankind. However society and the media fascination with serial killers and violent crime have put a face to a convict that most do not deserve or could even uphold. When someone gets out and makes a mistake the media runs wild and has a field day with it. The ones who do good, you never hear about, which are more then the ones who fail. This way of thinking and reporting on crime creates a wall of division between a convicted felon and society; we become a society of, us vs. them. This attitude actually breeds crime and helps it flourish. Most of you just do not know what to do and you go along with the crowd and I understand that. Some of you are indifferent, or extremes on one side or the other.
So how do we change this way of thinking? Education is one example, do you recall back in the 70's and 80's if you were caught drinking and driving most of the time the officer drove you home or told you to get off the road. Education and groups have changed that way of thinking and now as a result there is less drinking and driving and more awareness of the problem. Or if you told a police officer in the 60's that daddy was doing nasty things to you, the officer would tell you to go home and stop your lying. We can all be thankful that has changed. However it took a breaking down of a wall to make that possible, a different way of looking at things. We need to break the walls down between the convicted felon and society. How do we do that? There are a number of ways this can be done. One that I found a lot of people found very well was volunteering in the prison, chaplaincy for example. It is a controlled environment and you are given instructions on what to do or not to do. It might only be an hour or so a week or when ever you want to. If you try this for 6 weeks once a week you will find that some of your views will change. I will be honest you will meet some that creep you out a bit (they do it to me as well), but you will also meet ones that you will like, and after a period of time look forward to seeing them. The only way the wall can be broken is if you go over it. There are other ways you can volunteer, and you can contact the Community Chaplaincy, John Howard, in your area and this will get you started. Perhaps you do not have time for volunteer work and have no interest in that, and you are just not going to do it. In your life time you will run into a person(s) who was in prison (you already have you just might not know it), just once all I ask is that you give them a chance, and do not judge them on there past but who they are in the present. I have had a number of people sit and tell me things about crime and murder and what convicts look like, how they cannot be helped. All the while they are talking to me and they have no idea I killed someone and was in prison. Some people that I did tell later in life almost hit the floor when they found out. It took a lot of love and wonderful people to make me the person I am. The best thing you can do for any x-con is not judge him on his past and accepts him/her for the person they are today. There are jerks and idiots in every profession and walks of life, so it is not exclusive to someone with a criminal past. Do you not think for one minute that we do not get rejected on every level and we expect you to treat us as such, but when you say something nice or take the time to get to know a convict for who they are, it brings life changing power to them? We are told we are no good each day of life; we are never good enough for the rest of world, we are reminded every day of how we are less then everyone else in this society, and that is echoed through our self esteem and personality. Once we have heard or felt this enough soon we believe it and feel we have no other choice but to turn to a live of crime. Quite often it is the only group of people that will accept us, because you won't.
Do you know what changed me? It was not the courts, prison, or a program, it was love. Someone who worked on the inside of the prison took the time to get to know me, the good the bad and the ugly and after he knew all the bad about me he looked at me one day and said, "I still love you anyways". I was beside myself; I would have been able to handle negative comments better because I hated myself at that time. This happened over a period of years and I learned to embrace it. When you let your walls down and treat someone as person instead of an offence, the walls on the ex-cons side will crash around them. The amusing thing is when you do this, quite often within a short while instead of one person and an ex-con in the room you just have two good friends.
We look at convicts as adults and someone who is accountable for there actions and for the most part that would be correct. However one of the things I found over my period in prison was that most of them are like children in full grown bodies, many suffer from some type of mental disorder, many were sexually and physical abused as children. As all children we need guidance and love and understanding, most have never had that. I am not saying that some of them won't be a lot of work. However you could play a huge part in crime reduction just by helping one person, one ex-con, you can make a difference. It is not a goal or success that can be measured, but just image that if you became friends or helpful toward a person like this and it changed him/her forever. You do not fight crime as a war or as a whole you fight it in the trenches one convict at a time.
Conclusions
I understand that people are conditioned to think a certain way in society, it is normal to hate or be scared of what you do not understand. It is normal to be critical of a number of things; we are all like that at times. We all have made assumptions and had our moments of being judgmental and empathic, you're human. If we do not close the gap between society and the convict, we are creating a divide that breeds crime and hate. Crime prevention does not start with the government or some other group it starts with you and me. You have the power to change one life. Someone took the time to love me for who I was and it changed my life, and right now I have no idea how many people are going to read these words or have there live impacted by them. This article was by far the hardest one for me to write, why? Because of the emotions around it, I wept a fair bit on this one. I am not asking you to change the world, all I am asking is you give one person who has a criminal background a chance, no matter what your walk of life is. Changing something or the world doesn't start with everyone else, it starts with you.
Article Open for Comments
I wanted to open this article up for comments, I would like to hear your ideas and opinions. Please just be honest and say what you really feel or think. If you would like to leave a comment click here
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