When punishing criminals, less is not more

Wednesday, February 18, 1998

When punishing criminals, less is not more

PRISONERS: Hard time, longer terms are only ways to prevent
crimes

Thank God for small favors. After eight relatively tepid years
as our state leader, Gov. Pete Wilson finally underwent one last
bit of delayed embryonic development and acquired some guts. Having
nothing to lose because of his term limit, Wilson decided to get
tough on incarcerated criminals in California’s 33 prisons. The
governor is releasing his final cloud of ink to convince us that
the days of milk and honey in reformatories are no more. Much too
little and far too late, I say.

Assuming our soft-on-crime Democrat state legislature approves
this new measure, prisoners will be denied the privilege of long,
flowing hair, overnight conjugal visits, gym equipment, law
reference books and other amenities provided to them by the
friendly staff at the Department of Corrections. Convicts may soon
kiss their ponytails and free weights goodbye.

And for good reason. Why are we so gentle with our criminals? By
trying to avoid cruel and unusual punishment, we have followed the
American Civil Liberties Union and its likes far off the beaten
trail and become lost. Prison terms seem like veritable Hawaiian
vacations compared to the proper correctional experience that they
could (and should) be.

Drawing parallels to everyday life helps paint a picture of the
laxity of our prison systems. For instance, in the workplace, you
can be in a 6-by-8 cubicle, whereas in prison, you are in an
8-by-10 cell. In the real world, I have to pay $18 per month plus
an ungodly start-up fee in order to work out, while prisoners have
free access to the same equipment. I will pay over $40,000 for my
bachelor’s degree here at UCLA (provided I can graduate in only
four years), while the local drug pusher can peruse an extensive
reading and reference collection gratis. Finally, the last straw
for those of you who don’t commute: Living in the cramped dorms and
buying meal plan tickets that barely cover the cost of a stale,
three-day-old blueberry bagel will empty your bank account and then
some; while you can get free room and board and three square meals
a day near Chino.

All of these luxuries, and you don’t have to work for them.
Being a bit more careless next time you smoke out can open the door
to this exciting new world. It’s no wonder that parolees have high
violation rates since they see that the outside world is more of a
burden and heartache than the concrete walls of prison.

We can fix this by bearing down on prisoners and criminals with
very little sympathy. Why does wanting to regulate prisoners’ hair
or barring frequent sleepovers with their molls become such a
newsworthy event when it should have been done long ago? Shouldn’t
we punish convicts harshly to reform and prevent them from
repeating their misdeeds, for fear of facing similar consequences?
In a time when parents are afraid to even slap their children to
discipline them, we have forgotten what it is to properly
reform.

All too often, we settle for counseling and therapy to steer
miscreants in the right direction. The Seattle schoolteacher, for
example, who slept with her 13-year-old student and bore his child,
should have immediately served her seven-year sentence instead of
being released with continued psychiatric evaluation. Sure enough,
she was caught again with the father of her child, with passports,
baby clothes and thousands of dollars in a running car, apparently
with hopes of fleeing with him. The only suitable punishment
besides snuffing her life out in the gas chamber would be to have
her sterilized to prevent any future child-bearing.

This option may sound harsh, but it will undoubtedly deter
anyone who would have any inclination of mimicking her actions. Why
do we keep convicts in jail so that they can lay around idly,
waiting to be paroled or released to ease the burden of prison
overcrowding? What ever happened to the chain gang? What ever
happened to putting criminals to work at producing some kind, any
kind, of positive results for society? At present, our lenient
prisons make purgatory look like eternal damnation in hell.

Prisoners have the right to work out constantly and build strong
bodies. They also have the right to read an endless supply of law
books to find the most minor technicality on which to be released.
They have the right to receive unexamined packages from family
members, usually containing a good dose of heroin where the nail
file used to be. They have the right to spend unsupervised time
with their sweethearts in a secluded room with a mattress. Not only
have our prisons become crack houses and bordellos, but they are
also the breeding ground for smarter and stronger criminals waiting
to be paroled.

Then again, maybe we should let prisoners have the right to
these amenities. Maybe we should be foolish libertarians and not
subject them to any type of cruelty. Try convincing the widow of a
store owner who was shot at point-blank range that the man who
pulled the trigger should simply loaf around in prison with his
luxuries while she wakes up every day to work twice as hard as
before to keep the business running. Try to prevent a would-be
juvenile delinquent from spray-painting a wall or stealing a
bicycle when the justice system is powerless even to literally give
him a slap on the hand.

Now see if you cannot accomplish the aforementioned tasks if
prisoners are forced into hard labor for their crimes, if teenage
gangsters are faced with breaking rocks or bearing the brunt of a
paddle swung at very high speeds.

The state of Texas came under fire for killing a "reformed"
female prisoner for a grisly double murder she committed a whopping
14 years ago. Opponents of the death penalty stated that the
born-again Christian woman who was about to die was not the woman
who committed those crimes. If Texas officials had killed her as
soon as the verdict was handed down instead of giving her 14 years
in prison to find Jesus, this would never have happened. Everyone
would have rejoiced that a drug-addicted, maniacal murderer was
dead. Put them out quickly and let God take it from there.

These ideas may be seem extreme because we have strayed so far
from the ideal purpose of a prison. Halfway around the world,
developed nations kill suspects and then hope that they really
committed the crimes. Prisoners in other countries are carted into
the desert to develop the arid land with hard labor and make it
inhabitable for others. What debt is Charles Manson paying to
society at this very moment besides being one impetus among many
forcing prison wardens to thin out the prison population with early
releases?

We should kill more murderers more often and let the violent
bloodshed do its work on deterring other criminals. If the gas
chamber or the electric chair is too cruel or too expensive to
maintain, bring back the guillotine. Cut the cord and let gravity
do its work in less than a second.

The justice system may involve a trial, but it also involves
suitable punishment; that’s why we’ve got a blindfolded woman with
a balance and a sword gracing every courtroom in America. That
sword has rusted and her right arm has atrophied from disuse. If
the niceties in prison become few and far between, then we will
have been on the right path in properly reforming prisoners for
their crimes.