Last fall, the author wrote a piece of bitter social commentary called Prison of Our Minds. Overtime, reviewing this argument, the author noted it contained several flaws in thinking, that ought to be revised and reviewed. The argument that freedom is highly limited, and a tightly controlled thing in contemporary society still rings true today. Indeed, we all live in a prison of sorts, a prison defined of social norms and legal actions. It is almost a prison of the mind.

The weakness in my previous argument, comes in the notion of autonomy inside or outside jail. In jail you give up your freedom of experience and environment, but you still maintain your autonomy. Limited to a degree in your action, you can still act destructively in a cell or a box, except maybe in the case of pysche ward.

Prison is centered around trying to instill that degree of autonomy that society believes is lacking from the individual who violated a legal norm. It is about limiting some of your freedoms, but not stripping who you are as an individual. Jails don't make an individual hetermonous, instead they reduce privacy and some freedoms, forcing the individual to change his behavior to act in a way more acceptable society.

When you think about it, jails are intended to be an insitution for reforming people. They not only serve as a way to enforce punishment for bad deeds, but also to encourage people to reform their ways to before getting out. Jails are filled strict hierachies created by the state and fellow prisioners, not unlike what we see in the bureaucratice would around us.