My husband grew up in Azusa, California as the oldest of six children. He graduated from Azusa High School, but, when I met him three years ago, he couldn't read the word "stop" if it wasn't on a stop sign. He'd grown up in a very abusive and neglectful home where not only were beatings regular occurrences, but even proper food was rare. From the time he was seven years old, he was often left to care for his younger siblings. My husband developed a stuttering problem and probably had vision problems. Today his glasses resemble the bottoms of soda bottles. I believe that in school these problems coupled with the belief that "he was just going to pick oranges anyway," left him unable to read. After high school, my husband had a brief professional baseball career, married and became a production employee making writing pens. He held his job for over thirty years. He was married for 34 years and reared two children. Both of them now have families of their own and careers that assist others in the community. His daughter works for the school district and his son is employed by the city he serves. My husband's first marriage was extremely difficult. His wife had severe emotional and medical problems. They led to her early death in 1997. Throughout these difficulties, my husband was always a safety-net for his first wife. He continued to do the best he could for his family, all with his own handicap of being unable to read. I met my husband at a "bereavement group." He was recovering from knee replacement surgery and had been forced into early retirement. His company had sent most of the manufacturing overseas. He'd lost his wife after an eight-month hospital stay during which he worked days and sat at her side most nights. With very little coming in and no skills with which to win a new job, my husband was no longer functioning normally. He didn't know what to do. Even though he had family living next door, they didn't help him through his crisis. He was climbing over the cemetery wall in the middle of the night to sit at his first wife's graveside and walking out on the boulders at the harbor as far as he could climb in the dark. His children tried to keep in touch with him and help, but they had young families of their own. They did, however, worry about him. His son took his father's gun because he was worried about suicide. Today, my husband has many health problems. Three years in prison may be a life sentence for him. Although he's spent only three weeks in the system, he has already had difficulty getting his prescribed medications. When he was first arrested, he was not allowed to see a doctor and went without vital medication for a week. This threatens his life. Today, the prison dentist dropped and broke his false teeth. The dentist just filed down the sharp edges and returned them to him! This is the man that our state sentenced to three years in prison. He'd spent his life being the best citizen, father, husband and employee he could possibly be. He had no help and little help from society. If he made a mistake, it was under extreme mental and emotional stress. Weren't there other ways that the justice system could have dealt with it? Our system couldn't care less about the individual. What he has accomplished in his life, what circumstances he was forced to endure; all have no bearing. Our system is only concerned with putting people into prison. How will that help him? How will it help society? Will three years in prison really make him a better person? Isn't there a better solution? Is destroying him and his new family really that important to the state of California? Our state has over 160,000 people in prison, the most in the nation. Of them, 95% are expected to rejoin society when their sentences are completed. These people have problems to begin with. Putting them into prison will only aggravate the problems. Prison isn't a deterrent for crime. It's a college for crime. We're building a huge population of people who are being taught to hate society. Then we are returning them to society and expecting them to become better citizens. It's not working!