It was easy to think, because of movies or pop culture, that cops are a bunch of mean uptight jerks throwing harmless kids in jail for “smoking the reefer”. But that view was a little naive.

It now seems that everyone from citizens who call the cops to judges and parole boards are not just arbitrarily cruel but have a pretty fine tuned sense of “this person is harmless” or “this person is an antisocial menace and needs to be off the street”.

At least this has become my view after working with prisons. We were doing an ok job and have changed in the name of progress.