The Connection To Those Around Us

Photo via cnn.com

Your great, great grandmother was really close with your best friend’s great, great grandfather. You know the grocery man because you took high school biology together. Your sister fell in love with your boyfriend’s best friend. You bump into a guy on the sidewalk and start up a conversation.These are all different types of connections. Whether it involves your family or your friends, or perhaps even a random stranger, you’re getting to know the world around you.

These connections are why we do things. People will forfeit going to a party because their ex is going to be there. Kids try harder in school because they know their parents are going to be proud. Most people try, everyday, to be the best they can be, so that others around them can experience this person. These connections are the cause of various choices, as well as the effect.

A lot of those that are free take these connections for granted. They see their siblings everyday, and have date nights every Friday night. They forget that there are people, around the world and right next door, who don’t have these rights; that there are people who wish they could merely talk to their loved ones. When these connections are taken away from someone, that person becomes immobilized. It is as if someone has taken a piece of you, and you don’t know how to function properly without whatever is missing.

People that inhabit the free world know this to be true, but they don’t realize that it is even more true for those that are incarcerated. Without the connections to these people, society still has their jobs and their homes and sometimes even their pets. Those that are imprisoned don’t have any of those other comforts or luxuries, so they are forced to dwell in prison alone. For certain prisoners, the people that they communicate with from the outside are their only refuge.

Men and women who are imprisoned are forced to pay exorbitantly high rates to not only call their family members and friends, but also to use any sort of online pen pal database. No one seems to realize that the connections that prisoners have to not only their family and friends, but sometimes even to random strangers who are willing to talk to them, may be all that they have. These connections keep them motivated to keep trying, and to make better choices.

If rates were lowered, and more options were readily available to the incarcerated, perhaps society would see a change. In the middle of an ocean, instead of drowning like so many others, prisoners that choose this option will finally have a life vest. For, you see, if society allows prisoners to connect with the world around them, it is not only changing lives, but saving them.