According to a report published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, almost half of all the people who are sent to prison lack a high school diploma. The statistics seem to show that while the poor and uneducated are saddled with lengthy prison terms for criminal convictions, our system of justice gives more consideration to the rich and well connected.

My roommate, David, is a poor young man from a Hispanic family. He did not enjoy the life of power and privilege that criminals like Madoff and Libby exploited. David did not graduate high school and he made the bad decision of selling drugs to earn an income. He did not use weapons or violence, and he sold drugs to consenting adults. Yet his lengthy sentence suggests that our system of justice held David, a poor Hispanic man, to a higher standard than it holds the rich. That is an injustice, in my eyes.

Maria Perez is a criminal justice student who asked why I worked to help prisoners like David. As a long-term prisoner, I feel as if I have a responsibility and a duty to help all of my fellow prisoners. This is my calling, my ministry, the way I serve society and serve God. I strive to live as an example inside prison boundaries, and to inspire my fellow prisoners to work toward achieving their highest potential. Also, by writing about the prison system and the people it holds, I hope to apprise citizens of what goes on inside prisons and to influence prison reforms that will improve this wretched system.

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The United States Sentencing Commission recently released reports that show how federal offender demographics change. I think we need reforms that limit our reliance on prisons. our country should use prisons as one of many tools to respond to criminal behavior, not the only tool.

Certainly, some offenders behave in ways that warrant isolation from society. Those types of offenders come from every category. Bernard Madoff, for example, was a calculating white-collar offender who made victims of thousands. He was an educated man in a position of trust, and I feel that society ought to hold him to a higher standard than an uneducated offender who served time for having committed a crime against the public order. In every case, however, I feel that society would reap more rewards from its system of justice if prisons offered people opportunities to work toward redemption. I do not believe that warehousing human beings for decades at a time serves the interests of an enlightened society. What’s the point? As a man who has served more than 21 years, I can assure readers that the feeling of punishment diminishes over time. I’ve been in prison for so long that it feels normal to me. It does not seem to serve as an effective deterrent.

Justice means more than the turning of calendar pages. In my opinion, we ought to measure justice in terms of an individual’s efforts to reconcile with society. That is the response I give to the questions I received from Ralph Villejo.

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In a previous article I wrote that prison camps waste taxpayer resources. I’ve been confined to various prison camps since 2003. No physical boundaries prevent prisoners in camp from walking away. Since camp prisoners serve time according to an honor system, and administrators have classified camp prisoners as not posing a threat to society, I argued that prison camps ought to close and those assigned to camps ought to serve community-based sanctions. Jesus observed that most white-collar offenders who were sentenced to prison served their terms in prison camps. He asked how I thought society should punish white-collar criminals if camps were shut down.

The Pew Report documents the billions of dollars taxpayers spend to fund America’s prison system. That report showed that $9 of every $10 spent on corrections goes to fund prisons. Community confinement centers, on the other hand, cost taxpayers far less to operate. Such sanctions may present opportunities for offenders to pay their own costs of supervision. Yet not all offenders would be appropriate for such diversions or alternatives to incarceration.

I am of the opinion that citizens ought to measure justice by an offender’s efforts at reconciling with society. Those citizens who evaluate an offender should take into consideration much more than calendar pages that turn. An enlightened society such as ours has many options. Though as Justice Kennedy said in his speech to the American Bar Association, we incarcerate far too many people, and our prisoners serve for too long.

An offender like Madoff, who bilked billions, and who was more concerned about his own affairs than the interests of his victims or reconciling with society ought to face imprisonment. In some cases, society may deem it just to keep a criminal like Madoff in prison for life. Since he is 70 already, that may not be much longer.

Whether an offender is convicted of a white collar crime or another type of crime, I believe society would reap more rewards from its criminal justice system if it offered offenders mechanisms through which they could work to redeem themselves and earn gradual increases in freedom. Once they earn minimum-security status, however, they ought to release to a community-based sanction. Camps waste taxpayer resources.

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