Nate is a prime example of those who have been failed by the U.S. prison system. Like Nate, many people who are incarcerated at a young age have harsh lives after their release. For those,  punishments for felonies are far longer than just a jail sentence.  It’s very hard for felons to get jobs when employers take criminal records into consideration. On top of it being difficult to get a steady flow of income, inmates like Nate would have to deal with paying for visits with their parole officers. The line ‘I gotta pay the public defender who advised me to plead guilty’ stood out to me.

The U.S. prison system is so focused on punishment that second chances are next to none. Instead of working on rehabilitation, we’re turning inmates into either repeated offenders or society’s outcasts. Felons should be given the right to receiving federal aid and the right to vote, if not the chance to be treated equally to everyone else once they have done their time. I also thought of the monologue in a broader sense where I felt like we should look past people’s previous issues and look more towards how a person has changed for the better.