Human beings are hope machines. From our first moments to our last breaths, we think, we wonder, we imagine. We dream.
Hope is our magic. Hope flows in our blood, fuels our ambitions, lifts us up when we fall flat. Hope is our modern sorcery.
The essential strength of humanity is that even when it is reduced to only one human, each one of us still carries the embers of hope. That ember smoulders, capable of reigniting the full range of possibilities. It can blaze like a hearth that warms the grandest castle, or it can rage like a forest fire that burns the whole world to ashes. Our intentions direct our power towards creative or destructive purposes, but the ember itself is nearly impossible to extinguish. Even when it goes cold for decades it can flicker back to life without losing its potency.
The achilles heel of our criminal justice system is that it blinds itself to this reality. Prisons do not take into account the fact that this sorcerous spark exists irrespective of a person’s external situation. Hope springs eternal, as they say, and within each human being can be found a bottomless well of the stuff. A wise irrigator would channel that implacable flow towards barren fields that could once more become fertile, rather than dedicating themselves to fruitless efforts to dam up what cannot be contained.
Human beings need no external motivation to feed the ember of hope. In such a self-contained system as the hopeful heart, attempts to quash its nature only engender the development of alternative means by which its visions can be realized. If our prisons abandoned the doomed road of trying to eradicate hope and instead nurtured that vital human spark, we could direct untold energy into positive changes within the world we all share.
Warring against a person’s hopes and dreams achieves nothing save for further alienating them. They become resentful, but no less driven. If we set aside our labels and judgements - if we take off our blinders - it becomes obvious what a dangerous proposition this is for society. We have the opportunity to transform the lost people filling our prisons into allies, builders, and creators. What benefit is there, then, to instead manufacture enemies? Hope is free, but aligning ourselves against it costs us everything.
Society is made up of people, and it is not a zero sum game. When a person behaves in a way that runs counter to society’s interests, they also act against their own interests. If an individual makes law and order, harmony, compassion, and the other pillars of society into foreign concepts, it stands to reason that they’ve decided their interests and society’s no longer coincide. Rather than using their antisocial actions as justification for further tormenting someone already cast out from the warmth and kindness of the healthy, happy, safe, community-centered world we all hold as the ideal, we can move closer to the ideal by using our great collective power to identify the roots of our exile's disillusionment. From there we can lay the groundwork for them to find their way back to wholeness, and home.
Redemption need not be freely given, nor made easy to obtain, but to strip away the essential humanity of another human being is beyond the power of any society, however grand it may be. No matter how far away we send our undesirables, in their mirrors they still see reflections of us. Human feet are driven by hope and will always walk. The ember of hope burns no less bright in the darkness of exile. It behooves us to light a fire for the banished to place on the horizon ahead of them, not the one behind.
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