Blast from the Past

I graduated from High School in 1997. Early on in my HS days, my older brother and his girlfriend got robbed right before Christmas. The crooks got caught a couple days later and all items were retrieved. They had apparently pulled a couple robberies that night and so there were excellent descriptions of the perpetrators and their vehicle which made catching them easier.

The other day a letter came in the mail addressed to my brother. It turns out that one of the perpetrators had been up for parole in fall and this letter was to notify my brother that parole had been denied.

This got me thinking about what has all happened between that night and today. My brother is now married, was in the army and is now in the reserves, and is a completely different person than who he was way back when. A life time has passed since then.

More often than not you hear people argue that we need to have stiffer penalties on criminals. Even though i don't remember much of anything about the backgrounds of the defendants, I do remember that they weren't murderers, rapists, or hard core thugs. Just some punks that were out trying to pull a fast one because they were stupid. This person has lost a significant portion of their life because of their actions. The fact that parole was denied for this individual implies that he hasn't exactly been behaving himself while in prison. I find myself wondering how this person will ever transition to the outside world if/when he finally gets released.

The reality is that when someone like this is finally released, the world is drastically different and so mere suggestion of a smooth transition from 1996 to 2009 is a laughable. I'm not advocating for the release of an individual who was recently denied parole. My intention is to put weight behind the numerical value of a sentence. The threat of a 10 year sentence sounds rather light by our "truth in sentencing" standards but we need to take a step back and put things in perspective. Where were you 10 years ago? What were you doing back then? Did you know you'd be in the place you're in right now? Removal of an individual from society for 10 years is close to being a life time in terms of mentality. This is not an auction where the highest bid wins. These are individual lives we're talking about. People who could do much more important things in our society like consuming and producing goods and thus part of the greater organism that we all live in.

I sit here thinking back to that long ago incident and how heart broken i was when my brother was robbed of what would eventually be christmas presents. I was so young back then. So naive. So much has changed in both his life and mine and yet the individuals who did this sat and idled their lives away. I'm sure they learned their lesson a long time ago, but i wonder when it was that they forgot what they were supposed to learn?