4:45 am

on criminal justice. . .

This city is home to five military installations. That seems excessive, but is a big part of why the city can exist with no real economic drivers outside of tourism. It made for an interesting teenage experience. Imagine trying to find a girlfriend when there are thousands of dudes being piped in to the dating pool every year.

I suppose it could be worse. One county over has nine state prisons and the federal supermax, which despite the name is not a feminine hygiene product. Supermax holds the worst of the worst criminals and there are no leaks. Not that the most hardened criminals are in the dating pool, but I imagine there is an aura with the place.

Though I suppose that is true with any community largely based on one industry.

Anyway, outside of the obvious problems with the current criminal justice system, my problem with it stems from the idea of “cruel and unusual punishment”. Not only is that entire premise subjective, I don’t understand how someone who can commit cruel and unusual crimes is protected from comparable consequences.

I get it. We don’t exactly want to be committing attrocities or whatever, but somehow I don’t think sitting in the day room watching cable TV is working quite as effectively as we thought it would. This is verified by the recidivism rate.

A lot of my angst stems from the financial draw on the public. I want to say the average cost to incarcerate someone is more than the average median income. So not only do criminals cause damage to society with their crimes, they further damage the budget to punish them. This seems backwards.

I would rather see a two for one scenario. Whatever damage you do, you have to pay back twice as much. That seems like more of a deterrent than what we have going on now. Logistically this might be difficult to quantify but some things are pretty straight forward.

A convicted murder should be held in such a way that they are required to eat clean and exercise. Then after a time and some testing, they will donate a couple organs in order to save two lives. They can continue to live because you can harvest a kidney and half a liver. Then let them go with the understanding that they have paid their debt, with the knowledge that the next crime might cost them their eye balls.

Of course mass murderers are going to sort of get a pass, but there is a lot to harvest when it comes down to it. There is also the concept of needing humans for experimental drug trials. I understand this is touching on Mengele level barbarism, but these are not innocents. Granted we would need a much tighter system to ensure guilt, but we can figure it out.

It seems better than the pharma companies doing oopsies and paying meager fines with their current experimentation on the general public.

I am not sure what to do about child predators and rapists. Castration doesn’t seem harsh enough, and death seems too easy. The torture needs to be slower, less woodchipper and more covered in honey and thrown on an anthill. There are some medieval tactics I think we could bring back in those cases. There is definitely a dark entertainment factor we could implement.

For the gram.

For your average scumbag we could get creative. A while back I heard about a prison using inmates to breed endangered frogs. This seems appropriate. We can put a monetary value to such things and calculate the restitution. Less hardened criminals should be made to clean up. Our environment is a mess. If they find they like it, great. If they find they hate it, at least it will be recognized as a form of punishment.

Hard labor used to be a thing. I don’t know why we moved away from it. I am sure we can find some things for these folks to do that actually benefits the society they stole from. Hell, some of these miscreants might learn a skill and actually be able to reintegrate. We have to do something. The cages and rape are really proving ineffective deterrents somehow.

I am also a fan of public executions. It’s just getting ridiculous at this point with some of the sentences. There’s a guy serving out a 700 year sentence. Okay. So in case he becomes a vampire or some shit, we have the next seven centuries covered. Somehow that is not cruel or unusual but sending him to the guillotine is.

People will point to statistics about how the death penalty doesn’t deter crime. At the same time eating eggs have been good for you, then bad for you, then good for you again in my lifetime. I am not sure the science is really in on this one. I myself am deterred by the cage and rape let alone certain death.

I think public attitudes toward crime and punishment has more to do with prisons being out of sight out of mind. Even if you live next to one the punishment isn’t exactly real to you. If we put the punishment on front street it may actually become a deterrent. It makes sense as the consequences would be more visceral.

Some may say it has been tried before, but I don’t know how accurately the numbers were being kept back in 1780.

The real issue is, what do we do with the white collar assholes? Embezzling billions is difficult to repay solely by picking up litter near the freeway. Most of these pricks avoid any real consequences at all. You have to miss payments to the nearest politician to get prosecuted, and even then the victims are often left in the lurch.

Perhaps we can get those fools to clean up toxic waste. Act like a cancer on society, risk some cancer to repay your debt. I don’t see what is so unusual about that. I am sure there are positions at the wastewater treatment plants or perhaps sewage work we can get these twats engaged in. Crappy people cleaning up the people’s crap.

Seems fair.

Problem is, if the legal system actually worked our sewers would be overflowing with politicians so we would need more for them to do. Perhaps they could test the new colonoscopy camera brought to you by IMAX.

I really just don’t see any of it as cruel and unusual. I got busted for possession once. Not enough to be criminal, just enough for the state to get some money out of me. I made a deal to have it expunged in favor of 8 hours of community service. To pay for my crime I spent an overnight shift at the courthouse sweeping floors and emptying trash cans.

Alternative punishments are possible. With the technology we have these days you don’t even really need to supervise the criminals. You can just put a collar on them that if tampered with injects sleepy time drugs right into the jugular. Hell, you could outfit inmates with taser lined jock straps for all I care. I just want something other than locking them away and using endless tax dollars to teach them a lesson they aren’t learning.

All total about half a trillion dollars a year is spent on policing, prosecuting, and keeping people locked up. Conservatively this means every single person in this country, man woman and child, spends about 1000 a year to manage crime. Granted if that wasn’t the case the government would still take it and spend it on some other bullshit, but that number is asinine.

Especially when you consider children don’t pay taxes.

Looking at it from a dozen different angles, it’s just all bad. Some people get sentences that don’t fit the crime. Some people are wrongfully convicted. Some people get let out early when they probably shouldn’t, and some people get away with their crimes entirely.

Rights get violated, due process gets ignored, there is bias all over the fucking place, and true justice costs a fortune. There is corruption from top to bottom and we just deal with it because it is mostly tucked away in some remote high desert in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, the public is highly interested in the genre. We glorify the process with television shows.

Law and Order WTF.

Tragedies are mined for content all the time. You can’t surf your streaming service of choice for 10 minutes without being served some form of true crime horror story. From both sides we have created a massive industry that profits from human misery yet all that money goes into private hands at public expense.

I don’t know what we can do. What we can’t do is solve the problem. We can’t get people to stop using drugs. We can’t take action against the socioeconomic factors that are obviously a problem. We can’t mend broken homes or force someone to become educated. We can’t stop the culture from glorifying criminality, and we can’t force morality onto people.

The only recourse is to not get caught. Good luck though. There are new laws being enacted every day and there are already innumerable vectors into the system. I think one in three people will end up getting arrested in their lifetime. I am fairly sure I will steer clear of it in the future but you never know.

I should probably get my ghetto ass out of this ritzy neighborhood just in case.