This Blog is a little off beat for me given my official profile, but here goes. I was watching the news today and they were discussing the Madoff case and what he is now doing in prison. It seems that he is bragging to his fellow inmates about how he was able to screw all of his friend out of billions. He seemed proud of what he had done. As the TV discussion went on, one of the people asked if the punishment was adequate for the crime and the hurt that he had done to so many people? The TV judge told them that our criminal system does not actually "punish" people for crimes, it only "takes away their freedons". I got to thinking about this and compared how we treat criminals to how I was treated as a kid by my parents for my small crimes. My dad would "punish" me with a belt on my butt. Now that was true "punishment". Now days, the thing to do with your kid who has commited one of these kid crimes is to give them "time out". They go sit in their room for a while, sort of like being in "prison". Now, I am up there in years so I have had time to see how this "Doctor Spock" thing has worked out and I can tell you "it has not". Kids today mind much worse here in the USA than they have ever in the history of this country. Too strong? I don't think so. This is one of the main factors that is at the root of the poor school performance of our kids. We are the worst in the world for any country who spends at least 10% of what we spend sending our kids to public schools. I think that history has proven that we need "punishment" as well as "rewards" to assure responsible social conduct. I wondered off the topic a little.
Our prison system does not actually "punish" prisoners for their crimes except for capital crimes where we impose the death penalty. Other than the death penalty, there is no other "punishment" in our prison system. All other crimes get the same treatment and that is a glorified "time out". The only variation is the length of the "time out". These criminals still get fed without doing any work. They get a clean bed and medical treatment better than many tax paying citizens. What I am getting aound to is that we need to put "punishment" back into our criminal system. I know that "punishment" worked on me and all the kids that I knew. Kids who I knew who had parents to gave them "time outs" or tried to "reason" with them all had kids that were sissies who cried when they did not get their way. We all saw them as weak spoiled brats.
Now, you know that I am a fiscal conservative and am always looking for ways to cut spending or get better value for my tax dollar. We spend more on criminals than we do on our best students. Is that logical? I think we spend far too much on education now for what we are getting and the same is true and even worse for our crimial system. Remember when that case came up in Hong Kong when the American kid was sentenced to "caning"? That is just a good spanking on the butt with a stick, but us Americans were up in arms. Why? Because the kid could get a sore butt and not be able to sit down for a while. I think we should start adding thing like spankings into our criminal system here in the USA and then gradually increase the number of true "punishments". Anyone who got a sentence of 10 years or more should be executed and those with less should get a regimen of "punishment" and shorter times in prison. I think it would significantly reduce cost and reduce crime at the same time. We all know that what we are now doing is not working. It works to the extent that we have more people in jail here than any country in the world. If they are in jail, they can't commit additional crimes. I think that if they were "punished" and then let out after a short time to think about what they did and that if the were to do it again, they could expect a harder punishment, crime would go down and it would be cheaper. The longer a person stays in prison, the harder it is to get them back into society. This is a fact independant of the original crime.
You always here "Crime and Punishment", but there really isn't any "punishment". It is just a "time out".
