It's time for a new segment here at the Desk that I like to call Three Good Reasons. Each week (or month (or just today)), I'll pick out something around here that doesn't work like it ought and give you three good reasons why it doesn't work like it ought. Today's feature:
Three good reasons our nation's penal/judicial system doesn't work like it ought:
1. Prison time is an incentive for much of the criminal population. Not only do they ensure three square meals a day and a roof over your head, most of our nation's prison's are not terribly unpleasant places to spend a few months or years compared the alternatives. Not only that, Katrina showed us that the prisons are the very first thing to be evacuated in the event of natural disasters - before mental institutions, nursing homes, and hospitals. Why? So the prison doesn't get destroyed and set them all loose. But the real result of all this turns out to make prisons a more desireable home that the streets these people crawled off of. People know how to get caught and how not to get caught, and they know exactly how to keep from getting too harsh a sentence. Minor drug or prostitution offenses are responsible for a majority of the prison population and there's a reason for that. People will intentionally get caught for minor crimes just so they can have a decent place to live for a few months. That's a problem because it makes the prisons overpopulated with people who really don't deserve to be there. The solution? Make prison an unpleasant experience. We're too afraid these days of infringing on people's rights and getting the pants sued off us that we forget what the government is here to do in the first place. The whole point of punishment, and the whole definition of punishment is that is in some way or other unpleasant. If it's actually a step up to go to prison, then prison is nothing but a concrete hotel.
2. We put people in prison for white-collar crimes. It's true. Embezzlement, fraud, and other paper crimes can land you hard time. Again, we see a significant portion of the overpopulated prison system behind bars who don't need to be. It makes more sense to punish these sorts of crimes in a more fitting way - in the wallet. Make them pay it back with interest; that's what that demographic will respond to. Besides, it makes no sense to keep white-collar criminals in a facility designed to keep dangerous criminals off the streets. These people didn't hurt anybody in a way that would require their physical isolation from society like murderers and rapists - they hurt people in a way that requires money and only money to fix.
3. Another problem augmenting the overpopulation of prisons is that a life sentence is cheaper to precsribe than the death penalty. Yes, it's cheaper to feed and house a person for, say, thirty years, and even continue to build prisons for this growing population (which are going up faster than schools, by the way), than it is to hire the teams of lawyers and judges and other court officials to go through the years of automatic appeals associated with capital cases. The solution here has nothing to do with the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty - again the bottom line is, and always is, money. Money problems can be solved by printing out the budget and getting a pair of scissors. I'm no economist, but I know the government's wasting your money in more ways than this one.
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