FOOD FOR THOUGHT: NO ONE CHOOSES THEIR LIFE, ESPECIALLY THEIR TRAGIC LIFE.

Joanna Connors, I will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016) ("I knew Holman was trying to make me feel better, but it didn't work. I felt hollow. What difference did it make to me if other prisoners hurt David Francis? What was the point of any of it? American prisons and jails hold 2.3 million men and women. Counting various forms of community supervision outside prison, 1 in 35 Americans was under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics." "They serve their time, most of them keeping their heads down or looking over their shoulders, just trying to make it through the threats and fights and dull routines of daily prison life. And then after a few years we let them out. But to what? What awaits David Francis when he was paroled in 1984? His mother was dying, his father was worthless, he had not finished high school, and he had a rap-sheet that ran for pages and pages. What did anyone think he would do when he got out?" "I could't stop thinking about the utter waste of that life and all those lives, and when I visited Mansfield, another of David Francis's stops on his tour of Ohio's prisons, I said something to that effect to the warden." "'Don't feel sympathetic toward him,' the warden said, looking at me with a stern expression. 'Lot's of people have hard lives, but they don't rape and murder other people. The guys in here? They deserve to be here.'" 'Well, that was true, too. If they had not caught him after he raped me, the cops and the judges were sure he would have raped again, and possibly escalated to murder, He deserved to go back to prison." "Still, I kept thinking about what Philip said" 'I did't ask to be born. It's not my fault I was born. I still try to figure it out to this day: What did we do wrong to deserve such a tragic life?'" "In it I heard an echo of Paradise Lost, when Adam asks God" 'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?'" Id. at 237-238. In short, there but for fortune go I . . . or you!).