by Eric Karen

Created on: May 30, 2009   Last Updated: June 01, 2009

I will be writing this article from a very personal point of view so as to expound as much truth as possible. Relating to issues from my own life has shown itself to me to be the most effective way of understanding a situation. OK, let me start by talking about long distance running. When a young buck in high school I was one of the lead runners and technical captain of our cross country team. Our coach was one of those that gave us what to do and let the group sort itself out. It was a pleasant and comfortable experience. OK, with that little self-indulgent side out of the way, I'd like to talk about the structure of a cross country team. My class of team was made up of anywhere from five to double digit runners, but usually seven ran in most meets. The top five scored with the literal place of the individual runner added to the team total score. Let's say we have the state champion on our team and he wins the meet. This would add one point to score. The second runner places fifth and adds five to the team total. This goes back to the fifth runner wherever he places. Now it was very common for a certain team in our state to have all five runners within the top twenty five percent of the field. They were absolute dominators and they really never had an individual champion. Where they were strong was their fifth runner never hurt their score. In contrast, many teams had champions, but never won the title. Your only as good as your fifth runner.

Now we live in a business oriented society and virtually no entity is exempt from this. Generally, two that are exempt are non-profits and churches. Entities that are not exempt include prisons, especially since the introduction of corporatised prisons! It is obvious that these non-exempt entities benefit from recidivism. Therefore, I think we can honestly ask the question, "Do these entities, in their heart, truly want to reduce recidivism?" Maybe too, with corporate prisons, "Can these entities even SURVIVE without recidivism?" I think if our society were to go forward exclusively like that the best case scenario would be to end up supporting a population of habitual stop-sign runners. Not gonna happen right? Or could it? Today in our society there are popping up all over the place non-profits that are totally undependent on recidivism. To turn the coin, they sustain and grow themselves by ELIMINATING recidivism.

I think today recidivism is our fifth runner and if we expect to truly lead the pack we must shore them up. Let's try to flush out this topic by comparing the natures of non-profits and institutional prisons. I don't think we necessarily need to replace one with the other, but rather try to understand the benefit of the transition. Ok, what is the goal of the prison? In its essence it is to take away the individual's freedom. A certain time passes and the individual gains his physical freedom back. I'm skeptical if he regains his mental freedom with as much totality. Before the emergence of rehabilitating non-profits, most of these individuals had their physical freedom back. What more did they know or gain mentally? Over time, prisons have changed themselves to provide programs to help prisoners offer something to society when released. This is great, but you can't ignore the fact that they can't survive without recidivism. I think it may be impossible for ANY entity to whole-heartedly try to eliminate what feeds it. Can prisons ever be eliminated? That would be a whole other article. Can non-profits whose goal is to reduce recidivism help shore up our fifth runner of recidivism? I'm very optimistic they can!

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