Before we let Erik raze our penal code (I hear him giggling at the word even now) and rebuild a new one, I’d like to share a wonderful experience. A read. An excellent read, Dear Mallory, courtesy of our own, Lisa Richards. Here’s a bit about her backstory:

In 2011, Lisa Richards, a clinical social worker, lost her only child, her eighteen year-old daughter Mallory, to suicide

Desperate to unearth some good from her daughter’s self-inflicted death, Lisa collected letters to Mallory from her friends and loved ones.  She also began writing to her daughter.  The result is Dear Mallory:  Letters To A Teenage Girl Who Killed Herself.  In 2012, Lisa established New Middle Press to publish her tribute book to her daughter. Dear Mallory offers compassion and understanding, and its contributors hope to increase awareness for people everywhere, including teenagers and adults, mental health professionals, survivors who’ve lost loved ones, and people at risk for suicide, about how we influence one another and can make a positive difference in each others’ lives.  Please join us in helping to eliminate the epidemic of suicide, and to decrease the stigma still all too often associated with mental illness.  With over one million people worldwide taking their lives every year, none of us can afford to turn away.

This book can help teens and adults who suffer, because it encourages people to look beyond their immediate pain to future possibilities, including the potential that exists in current loving relationships which too often can be overlooked. It can help the parents of troubled teens, and those who’ve lost loved ones to suicide, because it offers valuable insights and wisdom in a personal, straightforward manner. This book should be mental health professionals’ vade mecum for guidance, support and reference in their practices. The writing is so real, so raw; it speaks to the depths of the soul. It speaks to the sufferers as well as to the survivors who ride like the legendary phoenix, unafraid to deal directly and compassionately with complex issues. It speaks to those who otherwise might not listen. It speaks the unarticulated to those who do listen. There were no dry eyes as I read your letters and the heartfelt responses of those who love Mallory. You have created such a profoundly poingnant and poetic tribute to a beautiful daughter who still shines, and who still may teach us all. ~Paul J. Lane, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist

If you’re interested, you can find the book on Amazon or at www.newmiddlepress.com.

**All profits from sales of Dear Mallory are used to help people at risk for suicide**

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Okay, Erik. Time to wow us.

Me: Okay, here’s a controversial one. I think the penal code is messed up. In my opinion, it’s too punitive. A lot of people who get arrested and thrown behind bars are in pain; they need help.

Erik: And we don’t provide it for them. All we do is we punish.

Me: We just punish, punish, punish. I think we’d go a long way but helping people and showing compassion. These are often just people with a lot of pain inside, so what can we do, Erik? I think we might just need to look at things a little bit differently.

Erik: Hell, yeah. Wouldn’t it be great if we really didn’t have so many jail cells? We don’t need so many of them, because people are in them for the wrong reasons, first of all—and for stupid ass reasons. And if you get arrested and it’s for a certain kind of a crime or what not, you should immediately be placed in a six-week program.

Me: Yeah!

Erik: We still have to pay for your fucking food anyways if you’re in jail, so why don’t we give you a good place to be and give you love, attention and therapy.

Me: Mm hm.

Erik: And they do a six-week program, and then they’re under like a house arrest—they’re monitored for another six weeks and we see how they interact with life. Then, if they already have gone through that program and they get arrested again, then let’s put your ass in jail if that’s what you need.

Me: Yeah, but there’s also the problem that these people get records that can’t be expunged, and they can’t get jobs because everybody does background checks now. That totally sucks, too.

Erik: Yeah, because it always puts a label on them. I think if you go through the six-week program successfully and it shows that you’ve done rehabilitation work on yourself, but it doesn’t show that you’ve been placed in a jail. There needs to be levels. A person has to have the right to go back to a life.

Me: I know. Exactly.

Erik: If that’s not going to be offered, why the fuck get better? If you’re not going to get what you want to begin with, you have nothing to lose.

Me: Yeah, one person gets arrested for ½ a gram of cocaine when they were 17, they can’t even rent an apartment or find a job for like 15 years. They can’t even be a Wal-Mart greeter, for god’s sake. They’re options are pretty much drug mules or tattoo artists. Not that the latter’s bad, but I doubt they do background checks. It’s ridiculous. They get punished for the rest of their lives for something they did when they were so young! It makes no sense. So, what do you do with the murderers and the serial rapists, though? What so you do with them, Erik? I mean, they’re people in pain, too, but still, they’re a threat to the public.

Erik: They are, but I would still put them in the six-week program. I would put them in a different kind of program—more solitude like away from community and so forth. Then I would take them through different levels of processing. I wouldn’t put them back into society right away. I really think that after the six-week program that they need to go live in a commune somewhere with other people like themselves so that they can reach certain markers in their lives to where they can be reintroduced back into the community. I think they should be privately tagged, not publically tagged, if they’ve gone through this whole process and rehabilitation because if we can see how they honestly tick and if they’re really successful, like they know they’re going to heal, then we give them a chance. We put them back into society and monitor them from a distance. But building that community in the commune, they’ll have the comfort to be honest to say they’re really fucked up in the head and that they really don’t wanna do real life anymore. If that’s the case, we just keep them in the fucking commune, man!

Me: Yeah!

Erik: Make them do something successful; teach the bastards how to knit!

Jamie and I laugh.

Me: They can be a self-sustaining community, of course.

Erik: Yes!

Me: If they need to murder or rape each other, so be it.

Erik: Just don’t let ‘em on a farm; they’ll rape the goats and the sheep.

Me: Erik! You bad boy!

Jamie and I laugh hard.