One thing I know for sure is that there are innocent people in prison when the actual people who should be in prison are sitting at the top there stealing from us. Life isn’t fair. Things happen to people all the time, I mean bad things they never imagined but what can we say.
I once visited a friend and I realized there was a new person in their house. I hadn’t met this person before so I asked who the young man was. To my utmost surprise, I was told he was my friends cousin who was brought from their village for treatment at a psychiatric facility. I asked what happened to him and that was when I was told the story.
This young man is an innocent person who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. From the story, he was with his friend in the neighborhood when one of their neighbors asked them to run an errand for him. For most villages, children do not say no to adults so they has to run the errand. It was a simple one. They were to pick up a goat from somewhere and bring to this older person.
These kids who were about 15 years old didn’t know they were being made to steal from someone. All they knew was that they were picking up their neighbours goat. They were met with the goat and accused of stealing someone’s goat. It was actually stolen but they didn’t know it was stealing. Funny enough, these kids were imprisoned for three years each while the main brain behind the act was also imprisoned for about 5 years. After 3 years, this young man came out of prison at the age of 18 years old. 3 years of his life was wasted away for no reason and to make things worse, he wasn’t the same person anymore.
For someone who has watched all six seasons of orange is the new black, I sure know that so many things go on in prison people don’t talk about. The state of some prisons in Ghana is not something to write home about so I understand if this young man came out of prison in that state of mind. The good thing is that, his family didn’t just leave him to be that way. They actually took him to the hospital for treatment and rehab and I can say that his condition is really improving.
We all know that not everyone does bad things because they want to. Some people don’t really have a choice, they’re just unlucky to get caught in the act. Imagine a hungry person stealing food and getting imprisoned, they really didn’t have if you ask me. If they had, they wouldn’t have stolen just to survive. But for some people, they do it with their two eyes wide open. Let’s take fraudsters for example. For some, it’s their full time job and they have dedicated their life and soul to it. If someone like this is imprisoned, no one would really mind because they were doing the wrong thing.
But then, everyone of us deserves forgiveness. I know that prison isn’t a good place and it changes people. But maybe , we could save the money we invest in rehabilitation of ex convicts if we actually provided a safe space for them while they were in there. If the conditions they lived in while in prison I were good, they wouldn’t come out and need rehab. But then, who’s going to listen to me.
We always wait until these individuals are released in a bad shape before giving them the necessary help, that’s if they have people who care about them. Everyone deserves a second chance, even ex convicts.
all images belong to me.