Of Crime and Punishment

Today, I'm going to talk about the prison system, in particular how flawed it currently is, and how self-reinforcing it is, much to what the true purpose of prison ought to be. I want this blog to be a source of points for reflection on your own ideas, again, consider the points and let me know what you think.

First, let me state some basics, prison is a PUNISHMENT, it is a punishment for violating society's rules and laws. If you do not want to accept society's benefits, and likewise pay its costs (in terms of following the laws, paying taxes, etc.) you are free to go elsewhere (generally) or to go live in the woods. However, by staying around, you implicitly give your consent that you will follow the laws. (Let me quickly throw in another problem is how low-level drug charges are generally flooding the prisons, that is not the crimes I am referring to)

When you break society's contract, why should your punishment not be reflected in this? When you screw up, you should pay the price. How is having a bed, meals, exercise, even TV and books some form of punishment? There are people with worse jobs out there then a prison 'sentence'. Further, by collecting all the individuals together, it does nothing productive, it easily gives these people connections and new ideas upon getting out. Seriously, ask yourself this, can it POSSIBLY be good that criminals and deviants are held together in one tight locale? Why on Earth would you want these people associating together and in such close proximity to each other?

In terms of solutions, I'll leave that for another discussion, some ideas that are definitely better, are solitary confinement, or rehabilitation with dogs (there is a lot of evidence that allowing prisoners to 'show' love speeds their return to society.)

Here is link which contains tons of info on the dog-prisoner rehab programs and ideas: http://www.dogplay.com/Activities/Therapy/program.html


When someone has committed a vile or evil (its not coincidence they are spelled using the same letters) crime, often they are given some laughable multi-lifetime sentence 'behind bars' or straight up death penalty. Now even if they are given the death penalty, we are talking years before any 'death' occurs. Now, WHY do we do this? Regardless if we actually should be giving this much punishment to someone (we can talk about that later) why do we as a society WASTE resources on a small component that has decided it does not support society and would rather hurt it? What I am talking about is criminals slow and impede society, so it is a double-negative that upon being apprehended we waste further money and resources on them. For no preceptiable good! How could ever coming out of a +20 year sentence make someone better for society?

Consider this, would it be better for society if we just eliminated everyone with these large sentences? (Forget for the moment about any humane arguments relating to this) What do we gain as a society? Well, we gain all the resources that would of been waster keeping this individual in a useless state.

One final point of reflection for my readers: in particular I am curious how shooting them in the head could be considered less humane. It is not less humane to drag them to a chair, STRAP them down, then stab them with lethal drugs? This process inevitably takes far longer then setting up a gun, and the consequent trigger pull.

This is a large subject, so I'll return to it again a couple of times. I still need to discuss that prisoners should be subject to manual or state labor, hahaha, until next time...