|
By: Ian Essling In my oh-so-humble opinion, the prison system in America needs a significant overhaul.
Annually, the state prison system alone expends $30 billion on its prisons and prisoners, and the Bureau of Prisons blew $5 billion in 2006 on just 182,000 federal inmates.
With the United States sitting on the title of "highest incarceration rate in the world" (in December 2006, 1 out of every 32 adults was either behind bars, on probation or on parole), these exorbitant amounts of money are only bound to increase.
I am not a big fan of giving free money to anyone, but honestly, if our welfare state of a government is going to throw money at a certain group of people, why should the criminals be getting it?
We could just lower taxes and let the people who earned the money keep it, or we could use it to do things like, say, defend our borders or crack down on terrorists or gangs.
But that's beside the point; I really don't care where the money goes right now, except that I don't believe it should go to a bunch of convicts.
We spend so much money feeding, clothing and entertaining the worst denizens of society that people who don't understand our convoluted style of prisoner management would probably think that those angry fellas locked up behind bars are our version of royalty. After all, in this country, being a convict gets you better treatment than being jobless and/or homeless. Free food , free lodging, free entertainment...pretty comfy for a criminal.
Therefore, I have decided that it's time for a change. What follows is my grand plan for prisoners. Be warned: even though I did (regretfully) scrap my plan for staging gladiatorial-style matches between prisoners, human rights activists may still be offended.
Give me credit, though; I DID remove the script notes for the first episode of my prisoner reality show: Five Inmates, One Parachute: Survivor at 15,000 Feet .
Now, on to the plan: first, living conditions.
Instead of sitting inside, in air-conditioned rooms, convicts should be outside slaving away like it's a Georgia chain gang.
Now, originally, my plan was for these prisoners to break rocks (a nod back to the glory days of 1930s prisons), however, nothing is really accomplished here, other than tiring out the criminals.
And, what do you do when a prisoner flat out won't work? You can throw him in solitary for a month, but in the end, you can't force them to break rocks without resorting to things like cattle prods and Britney Spears music.
In order to combat this eventuality, my new plan has the prisoners doing something else with their precious time: agriculture work.
But not just any agriculture work; the prisoners will cultivate crops, grow trees and harvest fruits.and then they'll eat the fruits of their labor.
If they don't work hard, they don't eat. It's that simple. We stop draining the taxpayer's resources to feed their sorry butts, and the criminals learn the value of a hard day's work.
Also, the prisoners will be put in groups. That way, if one con begins to slack, mob justice will slap him into line; after all, if one member of a group slows down, everyone gets less food, and no one will be happy with that.
With regard to heat and electricity and all those sorts of things, prisoners can (and will) contribute in that regard as well. Each group will have to use stationary bicycles to store up energy in their cellblock's batteries, and this energy can be used for heating, cooling or entertainment.
Seeing the advantages of this? Prisoners have to sweat a bit to get their amenities, instead of all of us working our tails off so that the government can take our money to pay for said amenities; it's almost as good as the prison system in Mexico, where cons have to pay the jail for food, rent and clothing.
Criminals should also not be allowed access to uncensored news. News should be filtered through an agency and then transmitted to the prisoners. Prisons should have a television network like the Armed Forces Network. Censored news, G-rated movies and educational programs are what the criminals need to be watching. After all, this is prison, not the "Happy-happy-joy-joy-let's-watch-movies-while-we-shank-Vinny" Resort.
A perfect example of why this is needed is the situation that arose with Agent Ramos, the former Border Patrol agent who is now behind bars for doing his job (he shot a drug smuggler in the butt, however, he then made the rookie mistake of cleaning up the scene before investigators showed up, and our victim-friendly justice system promptly threw him in the slammer faster than Barack Obama can say, "Look at me, I've been in politics only 18 months but somehow I'm qualified to be president!").
Anyway, a few weeks ago, Agent Ramos was assaulted in his prison cell after fellow inmates, who he suspected were illegal immigrants, saw his photo on television, identifying him as a BP agent who shot a Mexican smuggler. The assault would have been completely avoided by censoring the news before the criminals saw it.
Now, in a stunningly left-wing statement for me to make, I'm also abolishing the death penalty.
Yes, yes, I know; believe me, it pains me to say that I agree with something that emanates from the gaping abyss of liberalism, but honestly, it costs a heck of a lot more money to execute someone than it does to have them break rocks or plant trees.
Sorry to get your hopes up, but I'm not going to dance through the halls of Waubonsee with daisies in-hand and a Che Guevara beret on my head; I'm just a heartless Republican that wants to save some money.
Besides, it's a lot easier on the cons to get an arm full of chemicals than it is to spend the next fifty years in hard labor.
And I don't think criminals deserve anything 'easy.'
|
