Me and 3 other lawyers visited a bunch of female prisoners at a prison in Puerto Rico. An event happened relatively recently which prompted our visit, after we received a few calls telling us about it. Even though I believe that in itself to be blog worthy, I felt compelled to write somewhere about something that bothered me.

I’ve been a victim of crime, but nothing extraordinary. I’ve been mugged twice, had guns pointed at me, walked in during a robbery at McDonald’s, had my house broken into and robbed, my car window broken thrice and the stuff in it stolen and my brother was beat up pretty severely when he was 11 by some random kids in the street. The one that bothered me the most was the one about my brother. Still, I wouldn’t wish years of prison to any of the culprits.

When I went to prison yesterday, I interviewed several women. I could rant for a pretty long time about this, but honestly, you just had to be there. I don’t understand what’s the reasoning behind sending a person to rot away in jail for years because she was caught selling or using drugs. It’s absurd. There are countless other ways in which the situation could be solved and the person would still have freedom, albeit a little restricted. We feel so good about ourselves when we read in a newspaper about a person being sent to prison for years when he or she was caught committing a crime. What we fail to realize is that no one is innately “bad”. Most people are a victim of their circumstances. When we talked to the prisoners, all of them were poor and with little education. It was sad. You wished you could just get them into your suitcase and set them free.

Whenever you hear a politician going into how he will get everyone into prison, that’s just pure demagogy to rile up the masses. Drug users should not go to prison and sellers should have their freedoms restrained and supervised, but not removed. Bah.

Here are some interesting statistics on prison populations.

I have a case tomorrow where the guy faces 30 years. I can’t fucking sleep at all.