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They are inevitably caught for crime, and thrown into jail. They serve their time in a community of prisoners who can offer them training as to what went wrong in their crime, and how to better beat the system once they are released.
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Absolutely. Most go in fairly naive and addicted to maybe one thing, and go out sophisticated and hardened and addicted to maybe 5 things.
Imagine yourself in that situation. You are treated basically like an animal every day of your life, for maybe 5, 10 years. Authorities look the other way as you're brutalized by other inmates, maybe also by guards themselves. Nobody gives a shit whether you live or die. Escape? Pretty easy with drugs.
Then, suddenly, magically, one day, you're released. What are you going to do?
What are you going to FEEL like doing?
To experience an example of one prisoner's psychological pain in detail, read Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. He was imprisoned I think for 2 years, for being homosexual.
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The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different.
With us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. . . .
http://www.upword.com/wilde/de_profundis.html
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