One of the darkest news I read lately was about the treatment of the mentally ill inmates in the American prisons. The Justice Department has investigated this issue recently due to numerous requests. Prisons are no longer rehabilitating wrongdoers, but are dehumanizing them and then releasing them into the world, more damaged than they were.

The first report of this kind was for Florida; investigations revealed staffing shortages, lack of proper medical care for the inmates and an increased level of danger at which the prisoners are subjected. After that, similar findings were reported from Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. All of these reports have similar findings in what concerns the unconstitutional treatment of mentally ill prisoners.

What’s striking about this subject is that despite these findings, the government refuses to conduct investigations on federal penitentiaries too. It already took an eternity for the Justice Department and a lot of pressure from the outside to start the investigations on these prisons, what’s it going to take to do the same for the federal penitentiaries as well? Or better yet, what do they have to hide?

You might think that this is shouldn’t concern us. The men who are in there committed crimes and they deserve to be punished. But this is about respecting the law and not inflicting punishment as you see fit. The arbitrary way in which prisoners are treated speaks more about us as human beings than about them.  And moreover, do you really want these prisoners to get out of there more damaged and furious on the system?

The problem with this issue is that correcting all this will take time and money. And what incentives do politicians have to spend money on people who won’t vote for them anyway? None. This is yet another proof that no one in the government will do anything, even if it is just common decency, unless they can benefit from it. Don’t expect them to behave better just because they run the country.

If you look at the bright side, they finally made some assessments on some prisons, so now we have the facts of what is going on. But it will take some time to do that for all prisons, and some more time until some changes are implemented. In the meantime, people are mistreated, they serve their time and then they go out into the world, pissed off on everyone and everything.

This is the moment when you start taking self-defense seriously and you go off the grid to protect you and your family. Because, as you can see, no one else cares.