Legal Status Diversity

LegalStatusDiversity

When I was growing up I did not like the word diversity, or, more specifically I did not like hearing that diversity was something an institution should seek. I thought it was code for affirmative action in its worst form–admission standards would be lowered to allow people who looked like me to be admitted to places that would have been beyond our capacity to attain. How wrong I was! When I attended my high status college I docovered that there is indeed another half, as privileged group whose existence I never truly grasped. Discovering how the other half lived was an education itself. In fact there are many other halves, people who differ from me in personal identification, race, gender, hometown. I propose acknowledgement of another type of diversity: people with different life experiences. I have been at one of the highest echelons of society as a top graduate of a prestigious university. I have occupied the lowest rung on the societal ladder when I was shackled to the next women, bring transported to jail pre-trial because I did not possess $1,100 in cash for bail and no one in my life had that kind of money. The people I met in both situations were fascinating. The lesson I learned, one of them, is that few people have had these experiences. As an educated Escort I had been around in such a way try hat made me unique. But I predict my singular status will change to that of a person who is prt of a group. The unprecedented opiate epidemic has cut a swath through populations that erroneously believed they were immune to something immoral like addiction. Now people should see the war on drugs is a war on US, not THEM. Addiction is bring repackaged as an illness, and not a badness. Yet society still utilizes the criminal justice system to deal we with drug addiction. A huge population cohort is emerging (I have no data but I am intuiting this claim) that will be locked out of the workforce due to felony convictions. Many more escorts will be educated as they head down the path toward a felony or after conviction. We are going to have to embrace a diversity of legal status in settings previously closed to ex offenders. Otherwise we will have a lot of disenfranchised people permanently stationed as a new underclass. The only “career” options will be minimum wage jobs or perhaps lateral moves to other stigmatized or perhaps illegal means of support, and sobriety won’t help United States get unstuck. What do we do, we who are without family money and who have screwed up too much to have attained independent wealth. The year 2017 draws to a close. You, my Reader you may not care on a personal level about the proliferation of felonies at the time of this writing. However, I am quite certain that before too much longer you, I mean we, will feel the impact