User:Lysander/Prisoner problems

I think it's easy to fall into a pattern of using prisoners for one's own purposes (e.g. intellectual or emotional needs that no one on the outside will take the time to meet) and neglecting them otherwise. People tend not to feel guilty about it because they figure "What I'm giving him is better than nothing." In fact, they may even feel proud of themselves.

Prisoners tend to have grand plans for what they want to accomplish, but you know how hard it is to get anyone to buy into a grand plan, or even a slightly ambitious plan, even when you're outside of prison. Loyal and interested followers and collaborators tend to be hard to find. Plus, communications between people separated by prison walls tend to be one-to-one rather than many-to-many, so it's hard to organize group activity, and thus everything tends to fall on one assistant who lacks social support on the outside. Basically, a lot of factors conspire to produce apathy.