Right now about 1 in 10 Americans is incarcerated in prison and they get out and many of them continue to come back. My question is, does putting people in prison do any good and how can we improve our prisons?

NOTE: This answer was given on June, 27, 2008, during the Shangra-la conference in Hawaii.


Answer by Jesus:

I have given an extensive teaching on the death penalty in which I also touch on the entire penal system. So I encourage you to study that teaching.

The essence of the situation is, my beloved, that it is only the ego who sees the need for punishment and thus creates an entire justice system and penal system that is focused on administering punishment to those who go beyond the laws or the norms of society.

Yet even beyond it, you see so many laws in the current society that are based on defining for people what they should or should not do, instead of seeking to raise up people’s consciousness to the condition I just spoke about, where people naturally, from within, do what they came here to do because it is their greatest love to fulfill their divine plans.

Of course, going even further back – looking at the even bigger picture – you, of course, have a society that does not allow people to unfold their divine plans. Because, again, it is an unbalanced society, where a power elite has done everything they could possibly think of to prevent people from fulfilling their divine plans. And therefore condemning them to go into a negative spiral that gives them greater and greater frustration. Which they then take out in various acts – such as breaking the laws of society or getting into drugs – that are often a sense of hopelessness and despair, of not feeling any sense of purpose—or feeling any possibility of expressing the purpose that they sense however vaguely that life must have.

And thus, you see that correcting the condition of so many people being incarcerated is a very big topic that cannot be done by just focusing on the justice system, the laws, or the penal system. But you will see, my beloved, that it all ties in with the ego and its attempt to control everything. You have a society in which a small elite has been allowed to carry out their personal egos' desire for ultimate control to the point of going very far in terms of controlling the general population.

You then see a growing number of people who are actually rebelling against that control. And what I’m saying is that what you sometimes see as breaking the laws is actually a form of rebellion against an injust condition that the people do not have a clear vision to rebel against in a more constructive manner. I am not thereby saying that the people who break the laws are necessarily heroes or are consciously doing this, for most of them are not. I am saying that it is an unconscious form of rebellion against an unjust system that limits the population.

And thus, what you see is that the ego of the elite – even those who run the country in the politicians, the judges and those who administer the laws in the law enforcement community – often go into an ego-based, fear-based reaction of wanting to punish, restrict and control those that they actually realize they cannot control. But their conscious minds are not willing to accept that they cannot control the people because the system is broken and needs to be fundamentally overhauled.

And so what you see right now is, again, the situation we have talked about before, that when there is imbalance that imbalance will become more and more extreme in an attempt to awaken the people to the need to step back and say, “How are we going astray, how is the current condition showing us that we have shortcomings in the system, so that we need to rethink our approach and find a different way to approach this problem instead of simply putting people in jail?” So that people can say, “Well how can we find a way to actually educate people to raise their consciousness to help them find a more constructive way to engage in society?”

Yet they must also then change society to allow people to express more individual initiative in constructive ways, rather than building the frustration that eventually leads them to respond with some form of anger or injustice in breaking the laws and thereby violating clearly the free will of other people.

Yet, you see what I am saying here? There may be laws that are enacted to protect the general population from having their property or free will violated by certain people. Yet when the number of unbalanced people goes beyond a certain limit, it should be recognized by society that there is something wrong with the system. For you cannot keep saying that there is something wrong with all of these people, and therefore we just need to keep putting them away until we have locked up the problem—for this is not a sustainable approach to the problem, my beloved.

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Copyright © 2008 by Kim Michaels