Tag Archives: prison reform
Guest Blog
Recently our founder, Esley Stahl, wrote a guest blog for No Offence! CIC, an international criminal justice network based in the United Kingdom. In it, Stahl discusses the detrimental effects of the pervasive stereotyping of inmates, which largely goes ignored in our society. We encourage you to check out the blog and explore the other news and work No Offence! highlights.
Thursday Thoughts
“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions–poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed–which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
Thursday Thoughts
“In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.”
Thursday Thoughts
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
— Nelson Mandela