[Lifetime]

Actually, Durwyn, I agree with you more than you think!
I do believe that businesses and the entertainment industry should clean up their act (especially about that thing about Rap music..why the music industry promotes and encourages "artists" who dress and act no different from the regular hood in the street and supports this whole "gangsta" image is beyond me. Rap music is nearly 90% all about sex, drugs, abuse, violence and guns. I cant see that having a positive effect on anyone. But back to the subject..

I DO understand where you're going though, and I agree that America has to change this White-Trash image most people have of the average America. While America is possibly the largest influence on the world today, not all of that influence is good. I was merely trying to look at whats positive in America today, because griping about how wrong it is never changed anything about it. My relation with this and the subject of prisons and the like is that, like what Sir Kenyth said, they have to be a place of REFORM, as well as serve as a deterrant. Prisons ARE a punishment,but a punishment that encourages prisoners to change their ways to avoid going back. Instead of making America a harsher place, we should really make it a place where truely everyone has equal opportunity, thus giving an alternative to a trashy life of polluting the streets of places like NY with stuff like drugs, or gangsta culture, or violence, or the encouragement of cheap, casual sex.

The whole idea behind this is all about second chances. Nobody likes to go to prison, and nobody likes to live a harsh life on the streets. Neither of the people forced into these circumstances have much in the way of a second chance to change things. Ex-cons are ostracized by society, and most of the people on the streets today have had little in the way of education or social care. Instead of cracking down on them, change them. Change the way people look at them, and change the way they look at people..

Its funny cause in Singapore, there's been a recent set of advertisements which show a suspicious character brandishing a knife, or a tattoo-ed, mean looking fellow picking up a little girl in the street, but at the ads continue on the camera zooms out and shows the man with the knife working in a kitchen, and the tattoo-ed man with the kid meeting a decent, respectable lady, presumeably the kid's mother. The purpose of the ad is to show that even ex-cons can be beneficial and serve useful and honest roles in society, once they have been reformed and changed in prison (the ad is also a recruitment ad for the SPEAR tear, a branch of law-enforcement that deals with prisons, their tag-line being "Captains of Lives")
Its a very idealistic and utopian dream, but its enough to make me re-consider my attitude towards a lot of people who seem less-than-decent or suspicious.