It is believed the blessings of liberty and happiness prevails in the United States Constitution. The merriment of words: an ideology by people whose overall interest is to dominate the happiness, existence, and welfare of the people.
When a cultural group’s well-being is not conducive to law or policy, political influence shapes particular lifestyles on current and trending beliefs. But in the case of popular majority, moral belief will most likely restrict other groups from reaching their potential to what is free. For the most part morality in America exhibits the traditional footprint of white supremacy founded by vagrants.
There something to say when a moral obligation isn’t being upheld, but enforced as a law or policy to maintain happiness. Equitable standing to a person’s individual right is broken down to contractual measures, yet liberty to live and obtained happiness seems breached for Black incarcerates in America.
Within the American prison system social imbalance is created as a prison branding tool to assure relations between prison and society is maintained within the spectrum of law and policy, to maintain a permanent underclass. To appease the people in the name of public safety and government funding, rehabilitation and re-entry is concocted and regulated as matter of public opinion. But this is misnomer. Rather rehabilitation and re-entry are gentle words: no civil access while living in an environment that demands and teaches prisoners to be socially “others” to democracy.
In general, liberty is deprived once convicted of a crime, limited to resources such as education, job readiness, transportation, and housing. A smooth transition between prison and freedom is like a dry fish: unsaturated to what life has to offer.
But there are a few relenting main factors that affects a prisoner’s liberty interests:
- Prisoners are not protected
- Prison laws are created by the act of nature
- The free public is coerced by state interest
When rules and principles are absent from any process it becomes an enigma in terms of certain rules are riddled or misrepresented or vague. Though it’s true that due process is upheld and constitutionally protected by the 5th Amendment on the state and federal level, yet once convicted the deprivation of life and liberty are restricted to another set of laws.
Prison laws are knee-jerk reactions. The need for proactive thinking is highly recommended when life and liberty has been stripped. What once constitutes to be civilly unjust in free society converts to be just in prison. The criminal act of the convicted is considered a moral flaw among the free people, immoral treatment is safeguarded specifically for their criminality. This is not to say every person that is convicted is guilty nor is every person commits crime out of malice.
It is more suitable to identify early symptoms of criminal behavior instead of set-in stone beliefs.
Depending on the severity of how crime affects the state, law and policy become trigger warnings in the name of public safety to protect the welfare of the free people. Most of the time, the public is coerced into voting for crime policies that not only affect the criminally convicted but also themselves. For example, crime victim bills tend to be revised constantly because it never directly defines what a victim is.
In general, a victim is defined by criminal harm done to a person. In fact, in some states harming a pet is criminal harm to its owner. In other instances, as far as trauma is concerned, if triggered unwillingly one can file a civil suit for pain and suffering. The problem with this is how can a person know what triggers a person trauma without having some kind of ongoing personal interaction with that person?
That said, liberty interests have to be examined from a place of empathy. What makes liberty valid? Why liberty among the Black community is undervalued than any other ethnic group? Why are people continually voting for crime bills that’s a detriment to all free people and incarcerated individuals?
