Branches Book

BRANCHES

Author’s Statement: Jacob Marcus

Poetry is a passion for me, which I’ve been very interested in it ever since I was a little kid. I enjoy the wittiness of poetry and the wordplay. I chose my subject matter after recently visiting a prison, and have became increasingly interested in the lives and rights of prisoners. The U.S. prison system has many problems and I wanted to be an active participant in combatting the corrupt system by bringing light into what a lot of prisoners go through. I wanted to give some perspective into the minds of several different inmates. Each poem represents the different emotional stage of imprisonment from when some prisoners are first incarcerated, to the acceptance that some find after a time. My hope was to create emotional layers for each of the different inmates through creating individual personal backgrounds and life experiences for each. Creating a well layered personality for each character, inspired a more realistic variety of poems. The American prison system is very corrupt. Much of the system has been privatized and is built too much around profit, and not focused enough on rehabilitation. The for-profit system ultimately targets minorities by pushing for criminal justice legislation which leads to a greater number of arrests, which are disproportionately minorities. In addition, huge amounts of taxpayer money is needed in order to keep the system operational. This corruption, unfairly takes people out of their lives for huge amounts of time. It’s literally slavery.

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