Transcript
When Did Caged Chickens Become Precedent Over Caged Humans? If caging chickens can be called cruel and unnecessary treatment, we should read more into what it’s like for humans in cages. Yes I’m talking about out incarceration overpopulation crises in America and all the horrors that come with “putting people in cages”. No nation in the world incarcerates it’s citizens more heavily then America. With overcrowding comes the diminished ability for those working in prisons to properly protect the incarcerated prisoners. Today over 70% of people incarcerated in the United States are non-violent offenders. Yet prisons force people to join violent gangs, which teach them to make or smuggle drugs and force them to participate in extortion or other gang activities, which force them to face constant threats. Almost any one in prison will tell you that fights are routine and go unaddressed by prison staff because the fights are so frequent in occurrence that there is a lack of staff to deal with all the problems. Jails are mental and physical torture chambers for all those who must endure them. But inmates are not the only ones suffering because of the over incarceration problems we refuse to address in America. Pediatricians and child psychologist say the trauma of children being separated from incarcerated parents can “create a lifetime of physical, emotional and mental wounds.” If we can care about a chicken, why wouldn’t we be concerned about our own species’ children and the devastation they must endure by separation from incarcerated loved ones? According to Melissa S. Kearney in the Ten Economic Facts About Crime and Incarceration in the United States the economic cost to the taxpaying American is also extreme. In 2010 alone, taxpayers spent an astonishing $80 billion on corrections. This money could have gone to higher wages for teachers, better schools, better education resources and a mired of other things that would make our towns and cities a better place to live. To marginalize that we have a problem with excessive incarceration and then to read that poultry that we eat is receiving more attention amid an over incarceration crises in America, bewilders me and boils my blood. Nothing should take precedent before our own. We need to deal with our cages first.
