Prison Reform: Working for
Just & Effective Systems

By Joanna Davidson

In her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, fiction writer Ursula LeGuin takes her readers on a tour of utopian Omelas, the mythical land where joy and pleasure reign, where there are few rules, no kings or slaves, and the citizens are, in every way you care to imagine, safe and happy. But the existence of Omelas depends on one dark secret:

In the basement under one of the beautiful public buildings . . . there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window . . . . The room is about three paces long and two wide . . . . In the room a child is sitting . . . . The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes . . . the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. . . . . The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear . . . . They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that is has to be there . . . they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend entirely on this child's abominable misery. 1

. . . continued