Back in my 30s, I was listening to a radio talk show and a guest made the following statement, which initially offended me:
“Every time you pass a new law, you create new criminals”
That seemed backward – it was criminals who created themselves by breaking the law, right? After a while, I realized that’s correct – and the warehousing prisoners is “big business” with very strong political constituencies in State governments.
Making laws to create more criminals is a theme mentioned in Atlas Shrugged (which I only read recently) – that the ultimate objective is to create so many laws that it is not possible to live your life without breaking laws – thereby giving government complete arbitrary power to selectively identify the people it wants to call criminals. (your company made too much profit, you traded based on insider information, your web browser has too much market share, you can’t grow cabbages in your back yard and sell them, etc….)
[Think about the 2000 page Obamacare and Financial Regulation bills, and the IRS tax code]
States are almost all in serious financial trouble – only surviving because President Obama slipped them money under the guise of “stimulus” funding. Prisons are one of the larger expenses in most states. When the axe starts to fall. prisons will be one of the targets. (in CT, state law enforcement and prisons are about $2 billion a year in a state with about 3.5 million people)
Missouri’s sentencing advisory committee started requiring judges to read information about the costs of the various alternatives when deciding on a sentence for a criminal. Just how much justice can we really afford? It’s creating a strange alliance between defense lawyers and people who want to shrink government spending.
An unrelated thought – maybe the same rule should be applied to doctors when they order diagnostic tests or prescribe drugs
The prison system in this country is not ever going to be effective until ex-prisoners think “Oh my God – no, I never ever want to wind up in the hell hole again”. Prisons should not air conditioned places for violent criminals to go in and do body building and earning law degrees. It should be a place where you get just enough calories to survive and where your life is miserable. Perhaps teach you to read English if you somehow skipped over that in school.
The best part of newspaper stories is often the last paragraph. The last sentence of the NY Times story mentions there is now a movement afoot being led by the Prosecutors to abolish the commission that wants Judges to know the dollar costs of their choices.
I agree 101% that prisons shouldn’t be vacation homes but hell holes. I wonder what recidivism is in Maricopa County, Arizona with Sheriff Joe Arpaio. I am willing to bet the rate is very low. Eating bologna for breakfast, lunch, and dinner plus pink prison wear, no a/c comfort, is bound to have a profound effect on the inmates. The other side of the coin is a place like Gitmo, with beachfront, 3 great meals a day (better than our military there gets), and all the comfort of a quasi tropical paradise.
Several years ago there was a study conducted at the Bexar County Jail (San Antonio), Texas where prisoners were fed 3 great daily meals plus snacks for the evening. It was found the Sheriff owned the catering company and was making million$. He was voted out but never charged with any wrongdoing. He happily retired, bought a ranch north of Austin to enjoy his good fortune.
Dittos on Operation Hellhole. Additionally, I’d like to implement some kind of stern controls over parole boards, including assigning the members jointly and severally responsibility for crimes and damages committed or caused by the darlings they release into our midst. Boards must be made liable to the tender ministrations of torts law. To reduce correctional operations costs, indeed, pull the plugs on air conditioners, television sets, movie projectors, computers, radios and the rest. “Hard Labor,” must become a reality again and the sweat of the brows of offenders should be used to help defray costs of feeding them and caring for them. Absolutely NO medical procedures other than basic care and medication must be rendered to them. Hair cuts – .25 inches all around, please.
When I lived in North Carolina, they still had chain gangs doing work maintaining the rural roads. At some point someone realized that dues paying unionized state employees could do that work.
Would you like to see the responsibility for future criminal acts extended to juries that acquit a person at trial?
No, I don’t think so, Art. I think jury nullification was built into the justice system, but parole boards stinking of patchouli and humming Kumbaya were certainly not. They are paid for their “services,” and as any professional should be liable for their malpractices.
Obviously you understand that if you criminalize the decisions of parole boards and make them reponsible for FUTURE actions of other people, nobody will server on them. Without parole boards and early release, prisoners have no motivation (and prison employees) have no tools to encourage good behavior by prisoners.
Do you have an alternative answer to the issue?
Would you like to make parents criminally responsible for the acts of their adult children? How about their school teachers? Their employers? Their minister?
Here’s a story for ya:
20+ years ago I lived in San Diego, and my neighbor ((a plumber) had gotten work out in the desert where they were building a prison. He finished the job, but they had bid on another contract on the same prison and was hoping on it coming thru. I asked him “You said the plumbing was done. What else are you gonna do out there?”
He told me the State Corrections was sued, and lost, since making the prisoners drink tap water was deemed “cruel and unusual punishment. So they were putting in a purifed water system in. We could drink tap water, but the prisoners couldn’t.
And guess what – they got the job.
I couldn’t agree with you more. There’s just not enough disincentives to going to prison these days. Nor does it seem that the stigma of being an ex-convict exists in the same fashion that it did years ago. I’m curious to see how the enforcement of these newly passed laws goes and how many (or few?) of the sentences will lead to time in prison.
I’ve been listening to an Atlas Shrugged audiobook lately, and I drew the same comparison between the theme you mentioned and the recently passed bills. Glad to know I wasn’t the only one. Once I came to that part of the story, I began to see these bills as a chance to force more fines onto people, rather than taxes. That way, the government has a chance of generating more income and sparing themselves the public backlash of levying far reaching taxes. After all, who wouldn’t rather see a criminal be subject to fines than to have additional taxes levied on them? It might be a misguided conclusion, but the similarities in the new bills and that theme in Atlas Shrugged are hard to ignore.
And Art, I know this is somewhat off subject, but what made you decide to read Atlas Shrugged, and what were your thoughts on it?
For people who haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, don’t read the rest of my message
I had read Anthem as a teenager (for some unknown reason, there was a copy of it in the bookcase in the attic in my house), which had made an impression on me.
Mark Scott who was on WXYT-AM in Detroit was a big follower of Ayn Rand and objectivism. A lot of why I question “why do you believe what you believe?” was due to him, which you see in my writings the last month or two. Reading Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead has been on my “to do” list for a long time, but I was too busy doing other things. Since the book is in something of a revival, the time seemed right.
I listened to Fountainhead on audio (downloaded from the internet via my public library). I was disappointed. My summary of the book is that if I had been on the jury, I would have found Roark guilty, which tells me I’m not on board with her ideas.
After getting my iPhone last year, I bought Atlas Shrugged and read it on iBooks. Some of the things I struggled with can’t be helped – the book was written in the 1940s and 1950s and reflects the times. There is one fleeting mention of TV which was just starting to became available during that time. The overreaching of FDR and the New Deal, the growing influence of socialism and the expansion of government power was a good part of the foundation of her story, although I believe a lot of it is really a Russian story set in the United States.
It’s helpful to know her background – she was the daughter of a businessman in Russia before the revolution. When the collectivists took over, her family lost their wealth and influence. The government wasn’t interested in educating women, especially those would not become Communists. So she focused on being in the movie business, which is what she pursued when she moved to the United States.
There were several issues that kept interfering with the story for me – the first was her feminist themes – the men are stupid, inept and corrupt, and women are smart, hard-working, innately moral people who would save the world if they weren’t oppressed by stupid drunken irrationally angry men. She also dwelled a lot with the symbols of power and class, and most of the story is focused in New York.
In today’s terms, she was a flyover person – she has a thorough understanding of the pecking order in New York’s social circles, but minimal familiarity with what a farmer in Iowa does, what their life is like, what motivates them and how they would react to her story line.
A peculiar issue for me is her basing the story line on the railroad business. One of my hobbies is things related to railroads – I’m not an over the deep end railroad nut, but I have a moderately good idea of railroad history and the basics of how railroads operate. It’s pretty clear her knowledge of railroads goes little further than having ridden trains from Grand Central Station and maybe riding as a passenger on a long distance train. Since the woman who is trying to save her railroad is the smartest person in the operations of the railroad business, that lack of attention to details was a distraction. Never in the history of the United States was there a passenger train that ran coast to coast (but there is in Russia). The 20th century limited seems to be the prototype for her fictional train, but the real train only ran to Chicago. Still today, you can’t go from anywhere to anywhere by long distance train without changing in Chicago (only now Amtrak runs the trains). Her transcontinental train ending in San Francisco also shows some lack of geography and the railroad business. Transcontinental trains end in Oakland, and with good reason.
Knowing how the railroads came to be what they are is important to the whole story about the relationship between business and government and why the country is what it is today. The most outlandish example is near the end, she orders her track crews to “spread the rails” of a narrow gauge railroad in a day or two in order to reroute her trains over it. That’s just so fundamentally wrong on so many levels. You couldn’t do that in months, even if you had all the resources to do it – you would have to rebuild and reinforce bridges replace all the ties, dig up all the grade crossings, replace all the switches, rebend the rails going around curves…,(Russia went to a non-standard gauge as a way to avoid having other European countries that might want to invade able to use Russia’s rail system against Russia) Yes, I understand the book is a work of fiction, and there is no motor that can power the world from static energy… but the more you digress from reality, the less I trust the narrative.
The final page or two I found really unsatisfying… (don’t keep reading!) after they “succeed” in destroying the country, the first thing they do is sit in a group and start whacking up the country and deciding who will be in charge of rebuilding. Recreating the very thing they just destroyed – with the improvement (I suppose) that because they are better people, the outcome will be different. Maybe that was the ironic point of the whole story, but I don’t think so. I think she believes that if the right people with the right motivations based in rational self-interest ruled the world, the outcome would be different. I’m not so sure.
The book after Atlas Shrugged I would have found much more interesting and relevant. Okay, we now have a destroyed country, a totally collapsed economy, and the “right” minds in charge – how do you use rational self-interest to bring an entire civilization back to success from nothing? Show me how we create new steel companies, build railroads, rebuild the cities, exert influence over the country’s interests, build a new financial system, etc…
An important part of any viable civilization is you have to raise the next generation, and that takes a very large portion of the resources of a society. Her Utopia is very light on the role of parents (and government) in raising and educating the next generation. She struggled a lot with the idea of how to make rational self-interest co-exist with being a mother. Do people just have children because it is in their interest to? Is that a basis on which to build a society that has men who can build and run a steel factory and build skyscrapers?
The secret of America’s success and capitalism in general is it created a way in which you could create a company that was bigger than any one man’s ability to create in one lifetime. The ability to sell stock and raise money in order to build a steel mill or a car factory was what made us what we are. The alternative method to gather enough capital is for the government to do it.
It reminded me of H Ross Perot – he did an excellent job of explaining the problems, but came up with little more than slogan on answers to how to fix the problems (“if you see a snake, kill it – don’t form a committee to decide what to do about the snake”). It’s much easier to destroy a civilization than to build one. I’m toying with the idea of reading Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West”, but worry it may be just too dark and depressing.
Regarding Ayn Rand’s approach to Atlas Shrugged, you might want to take a look at her Romantic Manifesto.