Rehabilitation is not just for the one who is harming themself or others via inappropriate and unnacceptable behaviour. Nor is it just for the society that needs to be protected from such. Rehabilitation needs to express and hold true values of an integrity of being.
A disintegrated mentality wants revenge. It wants to indulge in the enactment of blame as a ritual that reinforces and nurtures victimhood.
Rehabilitation and revenge are mutually exclusive.
Our prisons are specialized examples of human limitation. We all need rehabilitating to release a false self-sense that usurps and undermines all our relationships, and awaken responsibility at a level that honours life.
In a sick society, who is to heal?
The principle is of accepting our own part. When we live this, we are no longer trying to displace our issues onto others - where they can never be resolved.
Insofar as we demonstrate capacity for communicating honorably, let us have opportunity to grow in its expression.
What I am trying to point to are the underlying cultural aspects that - if not addressed, will persist as behaviours of 'power over another' - whether via state or fellow inmate. To share the power of life with another is a process of communication and trust.
This is not just a methodological behaviour to assign to individuals and expect them to comply with, but an expression of a cultural movement that sees our self in the other and the other in our self.
Sex can be anything. Context is everything.
Good ideas can be foolishly applied at terrible cost - so ideas are not to be mistaken for wisdom but are to be tested in the heart.
To reevaluate what is currently in place needs to be able to report on the mindset that is currently in place or it is simply conforming to what is already in place and finding what it is 'allowed' or set out to find.
Love is not truly of the person, but of the process and integrity of relationship itself. It is active through us - and if trusted, will express appropriately in restoring conditions in which a blind and selfish wilfullness is restrained and a process of education and rehabilitation is enacted.
We all need this and our culture needs to be its embodiment.
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