How to reply to this

The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution is to me an important one, as it deals with due process of laws which are supposed to be enforced fairly to all peoples of the United States. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." (US Const. amend. XIV, sect. 1). With that being said without any doubt the laws of all of the United States are to be applied fairly to everyone without question. However, I often believe that they are not applied to people in a fair and consistent manner.

Working in the correctional setting for twenty years has opened my eyes to many things, both good and bad, Look at the sentencing aspect, more times than not, many people might be incarcerated for the same crimes, and the sentences are always different, and from my observations race would be a factor. In the facility I worked in, approximately seventy percent were black men, with the other thirty percent white and Hispanic men. The United States Sentencing Commission also found in its update of the Booker report, "Black male offenders continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated White male offenders. Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied. The differences in sentence length remained relatively unchanged compared to the Post-Gall period", (USSC, 2017).

We as individuals control our own actions and we should be held accountable for them, for example, if I am not completing my work in this class, then in return I should receive a bad grade, and then it would be up to me to do what is required to bring that grade back up. If I am not performing my job duties at my job, then I should have some type of reprimand placed on me so I can be held accountable. And finally, if I commit a crime, then I should be held accountable however the justice system would seem fit. The right people in the right places are important especially in the realm of justice administration, as those individuals with the right wisdom given to them by the Holy Spirit, are essential to ensure that justice is carried out fairly, to keep the rest of humanity in line so to speak, administer the correct punishments according to the crime that was committed.

I think that I possess a Biblical Worldview, not that I am perfect because I am a sinner and I am nothing more as we all are in the eyes of our Lord, but through His grace and His never-ending love we have that chance at eternal salvation. In my experiences in corrections, at first, I really didn't have any type of bearing on those who were incarcerated, but as the Holy Spirit found me and guided me home, I felt that I have more of a Biblical Worldview, I tend to look at the guide of St. Francis of Assisi, on how he despised lepers, and that is how I felt with the offender population, but then after the Holy Spirit worked on the conversion of St. Francis, he them embraced the leper. Now I didn't embrace them all the way, but I was more understanding with them and that was a wonderful experience to be guided from darkness into the light.

Any loss of life is a tragedy in itself, and the choice to knowingly kill people would be a decision that I would not want to undertake on my own, but have the wisdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as King Soloman had with the two women arguing over the child. But my decision would be to have the plane shot down, as it would have prevented a much larger tragedy like 9-11-01, but in that tough choice, I could have some peace using the experience of those passengers on the plane that was downed in Pennsylvania, forced down by passengers to avert a larger tragedy.

References

US Constitution. Amendment XIV. Section 1.

United States Sentencing Commission. (14 November 2017). Demographic Differences in Sentencing. https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencingLinks to an external site..