Were prisons ever able to rehabilitate criminals? I would think they are significantly more invested in this concept than ever before, which only underscores the torment inflicted on prisoners in the past.

My father and many of the men in my family were in and out of prison my entire life (they kept getting caught "driving without a license"). I remember my cousin sitting in the living room with my Dad after getting in to trouble, my dad asked him simply, "We'll, are you gonna run?" Most reading this would think the answer is obviously no, but it was always yes for my relatives. Not a proud firey yes, but a wide-eyed, hunched shoulder whisper from boys who already had families to provide for.

I've never known anyone who had a family like mine, and I don't think most people my age know that not too long ago you could leave the state to evade your mistakes. You could just move away and start over. It worked well enough to scare people straight, there's something about running from your past that cleans you up in a way jail time never could.

I can't remember how old I was when states started honoring warrants beyond their borders, but we went from being a blue-collar family with all our own bedrooms to my dad getting locked up, us staying in relatives guest houses, to in their living rooms, to an RV in the back yard. This went on for years, over selling weed. He really did loose his license for it, and kept getting caught driving without it when he was home. Around the same time the states started sharing warrants was when they stopped letting you get a license anywhere without a clean record. Again, you used to be able to jump the state line and start over, now no one can hide from anything.

This might sound perfect for people who came from great families, with parents who graduated high school when it was still something to be proud of, with mothers who had their children in their twenties. People who didn't want violent offenders slipping off to make someone else's nightmares come true. I don't want to believe that they were thinking about people who were smoking a bowl or driving to work without a license when they decided on tracking criminals accross state lines, but experience tells me that perfectionists are indiscriminate.

Rehabilitation is a modern concept in its infancy, even if we can pull it off, I don't see us perfecting it now, or even a hundred years from now. Instead we've perfected a system that can track your mistakes from Florida to Washington, from adolescence to death. There's no starting over for anyone. Rehabilitated prisoners are only trading the hardship of being woefully unprepared for life, for a half-assed crash course and a record that will come first no matter what they do right. Though more and more of us have been prisoners, the stigma is less and less avoidable. Rehabilitation doesn't help without a fresh start, and there's no where left to go.