"Shadow Lands" started out as a small workshop project for my advance fiction class ENGL 32000-E, Fall 2015. The idea for the story arose when I was walking with my father. We discussed how the prison population in our country is getting out of hand. Over 2.3 million individuals were behind bars, and there aren’t enough prisons to contain this population. These numbers of course don't count the people in parole or rehabilitation programs. The number of inmates within prisons and jails, has gone up 400 percent since 1970, and if this trend continued, we were curious what the United States of America would do when they have more convicts than free citizens. By 2060, our prison population would be close to 9.5 - 10 million.
Right now in our political debates, most politicians are against releasing low crime inmates, or funding proper rehabilitation programs, education programs or jobs for these convicts once they are released. Without help or assistance, they will most likely return to crime and end up back behind bars. This vicious cycle is what triggered my imagination to go wild. It was all about money; these politicians and other private interests would lose too much if they just released people earlier. What if it got so bad that we couldn't keep the prison population in jail? We would rather keep them imprisoned than release them back into society, so why not make it a little more extreme?
Let's take the convicted population and completely exile them from the rest of the country. England tried to do that with Australia in the 17th century, and did so successfully for many years until 1868. I took this and molded it to the USA. If we cut off a limb of the country, let's say New England, isolated it, and made it into our own version of Australia, what would happen behind those walls? How would the convicts behave and organize? Fiction is just reality that hasn't happened yet.
I can't wait to share with you chapters of "Shadow Lands" as I make them! I hope you enjoy.
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