Raw Material Reflection

This essay made me think of several prison movies and television shows such as The Green Mile and Prison Break but the one that came to me the most is The Shawshank Redemption. The Shawshank Redemption comes to mind for a couple of reasons such as that they both base off of prison obviously. Another reason is that I believe both stories have a lot of hopeful and hopeless points that the audience feels. The last and biggest reason is that it made me think of the old man, Brooks, he got out of prison after living most of his life in jail and becomes very overwhelmed with the world and commits suicide. "I felt that i was the cause of their suffering. What followed was a type of silence that only the mental disorganized can recognize." I believe this quote shows a similarity to the way I believe Brooks probably felt internally before he committed suicide. This essay mad me feel very sad because its mostly about the struggles of people who were not given the same childhoods as most people. The women were abused as children and that caused them to have different behaviors from what people with better backgrounds would have.  "I question the way Wright's Grandmother brutally beat him after he accidentally set her house on fire. The women look at me in amazement." "One of them describes the way her confidence had eroded after years of being called "fat house" by her stepfather." These women were treated very poorly and in turn acted out and that's what put them in prison. Most of them uneducated and young but years in prison made them more focused in terms of their future which is a hopeful part. "Many of the women in the college program are very smart; a few are truly brilliant. One of our math instructors, a retired IBM executive, used to say to me every week as we left the prison that some of the students in his Introduction to Algebra class could be CEO's of a Fortune 500 company. (We both know, of course, that these women will probably not even get entry-level positions in such companies once they check the "yes" box under the criminal record questions.)" This quote shows a very large level of hopelessness for these inmates. No matter how hard these women can work they may not even be able to get a good job. These women's spirit is a big part of the hope in this story though and which keeps it together.