Criminally Insane

There's a place we all fear. Most people don't think about it much in the front of their minds, but the fear is usually there, just the same. In the old movies it was always the "Asylum for the Criminally Insane." Always surrounded by big fences and concrete walls and old gnarled up trees. Something bad always happened there and the place is always haunted. Like Arkham Asylum in the Batman comics. Just getting near the place you could hear the screaming and moaning and the closer you got you could just feel the crazy oozing out of the place. It was a place you would scare people with because everybody just knows once you go into that place, you are never coming out again. Local kids would dare each other to touch the fence and then run away as fast as they could. A bad place. A scary place. A place you never hope to go.

The place still exists. But they are usually alot cleaner and brighter and less scary, at least on the outside. They are either a hospital attached (if not inside) a prison or a prison attached to a hospital. They are an adjunct of each other. This is where we send those who are too crazy to be in a regular prison population. And if you've ever seen any even remotely realistic prison shows, you have to be mighty crazy to merit a place in this august establishment. I always say "riding a bicycle upside down underwater crazy" but that doesn't even cover it. Those people are old hat out on the prison yard. And what exactly do they do in these places? Truthfully, I haven't the foggiest. Sometimes inmates go there and when/if they come back, they are better for awhile. But just for awhile. Then in a couple of weeks or so, here we go again. They are out of control and in trouble and back in my hands again. And I have to keep them from hurting themselves or someone else. But sometimes....sometimes... they come back even crazier than when they left! They come back with the crazy just dripping off of them and foaming at all of the orifices and hand them off to us to deal with. And someone says "Mr. So & So is coming back from the hospital.. They say he hurt one of their staff so they are sending him back." Well now..... isn't that why we sent him there in the first place????

Do we really know that little about how our minds work?