Interview with Anita Moorjani

That’s why I am saying there’s no ‘them and us’, it’s all ‘us’, we have made it possible for this to exist in our society. Until we change this at its roots, which will take a long time, we do need to have prisons because it protects the innocent people. There’s no way around it at the moment.

But even with people in prisons I think it’s time for those in power to start to really see why are we building more and more prisons? Why is it that the society is becoming this way? Why is the number of prisoners increasing? Maybe they should start with the prisoners and they need to reverse the whole thing as it is not about hating them, it’s about teaching them love.

There’s something lacking in them and it is really about teaching them ‘what is love’ and that ‘there is a better way’. There is a better way of expressing yourself. And everybody does the best that they know how in that moment, this is all that they have. Even the worst criminals, that’s all that they have in that moment in which they are expressing themselves.

This is of course not always easy to accept, because when somebody in your own family gets raped or murdered it would be very, very hard. You would want that rapist or murderer to go behind bars because you don’t want this to happen to somebody else.

But my question is: Why have we created such a society that there are rapists and murderers who are doing this? Why are our jails bursting at the seems? There’s something we are doing wrong. And this all starts at the time that we are really young. I see violence as a form of cancer in a person.