Heaven or Hell

Last Friday in class we kind of touched on the subject of police justice and justice in the sense of when average people (i.e., not the ones trained or paid to do) put justice in their own hands. Don't worry I am not here to talk about the police brutality incidents that have been in the mass media, because they bring forth a lot of controversy. Perhaps I will like to discuss a situation that happened to me personally. As mentioned as a side-note in class, my uncle is in prison awaiting trial for a crime they cant find specific evidence of him committing and one honestly the police couldn't find a better candidate for other than a man on parole with a felony on his record. When visiting him, we are in a confined, police and camera operating room with many other families, unlike the traditional ones on TV that are through a plexi-glass window. During our visit however a mother was seen handing an unapproved object under the table to the prisoner and that's when all havoc broke loose. The guards get up and chase the man around the room and after multiple, failed attempts to catch him, they bring out a special mace that was extremely potent and harmful to all in contact with it. The families including a family with a mother and a new-born infant were in the range of the firing of the mace and the yelled at the elderly mother as well as her prisoner son near me to stop screaming when her oxygen tank was failing to keep fresh oxygen in her lungs because of the toxic air. In all this chaos the police eventually catch the convict and start beating him mindlessly. In front of me, my nephew, and many other young people who shouldn't see that in type of violence in person and in such harsh conditions. Plus, getting a sense of how harmful the spray was, everyone had to stay behind and get medical evaluations because they couldn't let anyone leave the facility in a worse condition than they came in. What astonished me, was as all the prisoners were being dragged away, they weren't given saline to wash out their eyes like we did, they weren't medically evaluated, instead they were forced to the ground some of which the mace spray had dripped on and have been conditioned to just be okay with such treatment. My question to you, my classmates, is that when you envision prison, do you see it as a privilege (i.e., three free meals a day, TV, exercise) or as legal human torture (i.e., keeping them in animalistic conditions)?