The prison

The major general, head of the bureau, stood high up looking down at the prisoners sunning themselves in the yard and asked:

• Director, report to me on the results of the ethics education for prisoners under your pilot programme.
  The prison director said:
• Sir, after a year as director of Prison H7, I realised that the cost of keeping a prison running takes a great deal of the budget, which means a great deal of the people's tax money to hold those who are guilty. The more guilty people a society has, the more money the people have to spend, and that is absurd. One person's crime makes others pay.
  I also noticed that many prisons fill their idle time by having prisoners build up their physical strength. Many men leave prison turned into deadlier killing machines than before. They come out with extraordinary strength, and with the reputation of having been inside, they quickly make a name for themselves in society. The people's tax money has helped create more criminals.
  Inside prisons, underground gangs form to trade in drugs, hold sway over even the guards and run criminal rings outside. In general the situation is very unfavourable. I was troubled by how to reform prisoners properly, so that they leave better than they came in. We can't spend so much of the people's tax money and end up back where we started.
  I searched everywhere for sources of ethical teaching, day and night, online and in books. A favourable factor is that the Law on Belief and Religion now allows prisoners to practise their religious rituals. I also distilled the ethical essence of the religions. In particular there are websites devoted to ethics, such as the FOUNDATIONS OF ETHICS site, which is also very good (hehe!!).
  I asked my fellow guards to compile these together into an ethics curriculum for the prisoners to study. The Law of Cause and Effect is extremely beneficial. I also added the practice of calming the mind and meditation.
  I had altars of the different religions set up next to one another so that prisoners could worship in a spirit of national unity.
  After completing the curriculum, I asked the guards to study and discuss it first so that they absorbed it. I drew up a proposal to the bureau asking to pilot the teaching of ethics. Fortunately the bureau's leaders supported and encouraged it. Then I began to have the prisoners attend classes. They took notes, answered test questions, and their psychological and moral changes were assessed.
  After a year of studying ethics, the prisoners have changed visibly and the earlier problems have greatly decreased. Recently a few prisoners were granted an amnesty, and they cried and refused to leave, saying they were happier in here and that outside they would feel so lost. I had to coax them for a long time before they would go. Some prisoners who have completed their sentences still come back now and then to visit the guards because they miss them. They have all reintegrated well into the community, with no sign of reoffending.
  The major general nodded and said:
• I've heard reports through my own channels that Prison H7 reforms prisoners effectively. Write me a detailed report so that I can report to the ministry. Who knows, if the ministry asks the government for direction to apply it nationwide, that would be wonderful. 👮‍♂️

In the old days the punishment for a criminal was sometimes cutting off hands and feet, harming the body. Today, being civilised, we only imprison, depriving freedom. Imprisonment has two aims: one is punishment, the other is separating the offender from society for fear they will harm the community. These two aims are not enough to change a prisoner's heart. They need to be taught a special ethics curriculum to be completely transformed.

A prison should not be a place to vent anger but a place of ethical education. Ethical education for prisoners is extremely hard because their starting point is comparatively low next to other people's. Therefore the curriculum for teaching ethics to prisoners must be extremely clever and effective. Teaching ethics to students already fails time and again; teaching it to prisoners will be many times harder.

There are also people serving sentences because of wrongful convictions, and people serving sentences through unwitting involvement in someone else's crime. They have no problem with ethics, but they are few. The rest, the majority of prisoners, have a moral shortcoming. Criminal law calls the factor of moral shortcoming "fault". If that factor of fault is not thoroughly corrected, it will go on causing trouble in life.

For the most part, when committing a crime, no one considers it a crime; they refuse to admit fault, object to the punishment and deny karmic consequences. To reverse that mentality now is very hard. To educate and persuade them to admit fault, accept punishment gladly and believe in painful karmic results is not easy. It is hard, but it must be done, in order to save their lives and keep society stable in the long run.
Moreover, teaching ethics resolutely to prisoners keeps the people's tax money from being wasted.