Transexuals

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Thank you for this, Losty.

I get very emotional about this subject. I think because I look at society as a whole and how they view prisoners and it makes me so sad. And often when I try to speak up about it I am attack for being a rape apologist or a murder apologist or a whatever apologist. It's really hard for me to understand people sometimes. It's like I'm on a different brain wave. In my mind, you shouldn't define a person by the bad things they may have done. In my mind, all people deserve empathy.

There is no doubt in my mind that there are people who must be locked up for the protection of society. That said, the USA has dangerously eroded our civil rights, particularly in the courtroom, and thus we incarcerate seven times as many, by percent, as any First World nation. We lock up more people total than China, who have four times our population! 

Even under the notion that every person there belongs there, or for as long as they've been sent there, it is critical that we treat the incarcerated more humanly and humanely than we do... the conditions would appall you, if you knew, and much of it is through the deliberate action of the staff. Showing human empathy even in the face of the utmost wrong is not only humanism, it's what stops us from being as bad as the people we are wishing/trying to harm in retaliation-- all of whom had their reasons (however ill-considered) for doing the things they did.