Hello friends,
Hope you are well today.
How is this weekend going?
We’re having a heatwave here so this week I am practically dead and sleepy. The sleepiness is the new reaction to the 40 degrees of African heat.
You know I wanted to give this article various titles, some even with the words of suicide in them, but I eventually settled for this one. I feel this title is suitable because when we see prisoners on death row, we’re quick to judge. We forget to see that none of us was around to change the course of their life for the better at the age of five and no five-year-old will understand this article because they hardly know how to read or even understand life if they’re just starting to live.
According to research from Texas death row studies, eighty percent of people on death row come from stories like this one below. They all come from dysfunctional families. Eighty percent of people on death row had exposure to the juvenile justice system.
Please take a look at the video at the end of this article. I referred to the video to write this article.
Here is the story of Will.
Will’s father left them when his mother was pregnant with him. Will’s mother was a single mother. She was no ordinary single mother though, as she was a paranoid schizophrenic. When Will was five year’s old, his mother chased him around the house with a butcher knife saying she is going to kill him. Social services intervened, and Will’s mother was put into a psychiatric hospital. Will lived for several years with his older brother until his older brother committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart. After that, Will was living from one family to another. By the age of nine, he was living on his own. He lived by himself for two years until joining a gang where he committed a series of serious crimes until he murdered someone horribly. He was executed for that crime.
How can WE intervene in the life of a murderer before he/she becomes a murderer?
So, the problem really starts here. This is a social issue that can save lives and have less violent people and criminals off the street.
This question is really a question for the government in all the countries in our world.
How can WE intervene in the life of a murderer before he/she becomes a murderer?
This video, in my opinion, is true to all countries. Let’s take South Africa, for example.
Wouldn’t it be less costly to keep thousands of prisoners and all the running costs that go with that until they die if the government invested in services in chapter 1 (the first chapters) of these lives? There would be less money spent to keep criminals and dangerous people off the street.
According to David R. Dow in the video below, “Will and 80 percent of people on death row had five chapters in their lives before the four chapters of their lives in the death penalty story. I think of these five chapters as points of intervention; places in their lives when our society should have intervened in their lives and nudged them off the path they were on that created a consequence that we all…”
Here are the five chapters before the chapters that begin at trial.
Prenatal infancy > Early childhood > K5 > 6-12 > Juvenile Justice System
See there were a wide variety of things that society could do through this whole cycle. According to David R. Dow, there are more than 3000 strategies that could be implemented to put kids like Will on the right path. Taxpayers and citizens are the key part to help with social issues and spending our money where everyone benefits (because this is a collective thing we’ve been doing for years) instead of our money going into the wrong things including corrupted politicians.
This is something I have always thought about but didn’t know a lot of people who shared this thought with me, “We could provide early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free. Other states do that, but Texas doesn’t. We could be providing special schools at both the high school and middle school level but even in K through 5 to kids that are economically disadvantaged and particularly to kids that had exposure to the juvenile justice system. We could intervene in dangerous, dysfunctional homes and get kids out of them. If we are going to do that, we will need a place to put them.”
The argument is that some kids will fall through the cracks but the system that David R. Dow talks about shows that the process to reform kids and adolescents can be longer because of the four chapters that begin when they go on trial, which means that they can still be saved.
The part that impacted me the most was, “But the thing is that for every $15 000 that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save $ 80 000 in crime-related costs later down the year.”
The day Will was executed, this was the conversation he had with David R. Dow. They were talking because there was nothing left to do.
“I know the story. I’ve read the records. I know that she tried to kill you, but I always wondered if you really actually remember that? I don’t remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember someone telling you.”
Will looked at David, leaned forward and said, “Professor, I don’t mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are and chases you through the house screaming she’s going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there,” he looked at me and he said, “That’s something you don’t forget.”
Here is the link to David R. Dow’s talk with statistics for Texas and comparisons to other states in the USA.
If this is the United States of America; a first world country that has so many homicides even with some sort of system in place, can you imagine what violence and crime are like in third world countries?
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by either purchasing one of my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to reevaluate them.
