Wendell's Diary

The judicial system is supposed to represent justice. Instead, it represents control. Cold, biased, and dehumanizing, it strips away the humanity of the accused and replaces it with a sterile, systematic process where facts aren’t facts, voices go unheard, and decisions are made without compassion or understanding. When you step into the judicial system—whether in criminal court or mental health court—you lose your agency. Your life, your circumstances, your truth are all reduced to a fact sheet, a document that defines your entire existence for the court. But these “facts” are often incomplete or outright wrong. And yet, because they’re written down, judges treat them as absolute truth. There’s no room for your input, no space for context. The person at the center of it all—the accused—is silenced. Judges, the supposed arbiters of fairness, are anything but impartial. They bring their own biases, their own cold and clinical approach to decisions that could alter someone’s life forever...

Over a year of my life has been spent locked up in psychiatric wards. Not because I wanted help, but because the system decided I needed it. Five times I was institutionalized, each stay lasting two to three months. And each time, the experience was the same: cold, clinical, and utterly dehumanizing. When you arrive, they strip everything from you. Your possessions, your phone, your access to the outside world—they take it all away. They pat you down, remove any sense of individuality, and throw you into a locked ward filled with people struggling as much, if not more, than you are. The wards feel like prisons. You can’t leave. You can’t smoke, no matter how much your body craves it. You’re monitored constantly, like a specimen in a glass tank. The showers are cold, the environment sterile, and the doctors visit you for 10 minutes every few days, just long enough to adjust your medications and move on. They don’t listen. They don’t care. If you don’t agree with their decisions, you’re ...