4. Concluding paragraph

 Question: Various social commentators over the centuries, including Dostoevsky, have said that the degree of civilization of a country can be measured by the way it treats its inmates or those in prison. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this idea?

Torture, mistreatment, abuse, and miserable and dangerous conditions are seen by many people as signs of barbarism. I am one of these people. I believe that when these negative social conditions and actions manifest themselves in a society, they indicate that something is wrong in that society. I will explain my reasons for this.

Those who are most likely to be mistreated, tortured or held in terrible conditions are prisoners.

Since the second half of the 20th century, with the implementation of Human Rights, profound progress has been made in guaranteeing human dignity to millions of people. However, prisoners are the ones who see their rights violated the most, either because societies think that for having committed crimes they should receive a life of misery, or because poor countries cannot guarantee a dignified life to those who are imprisoned.

This could follow Dostoevsky's idea, in the sense that although there are differences regarding how prisoners are treated according to country, the prisons of Latin America and Africa are the most terrible regarding the treatment of prisoners and those of the North of Europe and some of North America the "best" regarding the treatment of prisoners, this is related to the economic reality of the countries, since the poorest countries and regions of the world treat prisoners worse than the others. richer areas.

In any case, I believe that as mentioned before, Human Rights brought about progress in this matter, where it is forbidden in our time to legalize issues such as torture, executions, state assassinations, among other types of harassment of life. This represents an advance in terms of guarantees of dignity for millions of people.

Now, I think that the reflection should be a little deeper and should aim to ask who is imprisoned? How did they get there? And I think we could reach some similar components even between rich and poor countries, to a large extent poor people and all those who occupy a low place in the social pyramid are imprisoned and that in countries like the United States this is linked to racism and mostly black people are the ones who go to jail.