Bob Hayes Online

Shrouded in mystery.

Yeah, it’s freakin’ Sherlock Holmes territory over here. Nobody can figure it out.

My adorable six-year old was concerned about burglars and/or robbers. She said “I need something to use against them if they come.”

I said “you mean like a weapon or something?”

“No. I don’t want to do it myself. Something would do it for me. I would have like a metal detector all around the house, because robbers usually have metal. Yes. They have either guns or swords. Mostly swords. I would have a TV in my room and it would show what was in the detectors. And I would know if they were up to no good.”

I agreed that this was a sound concept.

“And then when I saw them, lasers would shoot out and kill them.”

As a geek, and as a heartless Republican, I am so doubly proud of my little robber-killing engineer.

Frustrated by scam telemarketing calls from a dishonest extended-warranty company, an Ohio man snapped on the phone and apparently made some threats.

No, he shouldn’t have said that he would come and burn down their building. That was wrong. But at the same time, does he really need to be locked up? Nobody thinks he meant it, that he poses any genuine danger. He was just frustrated with having to deal with these scammers.

Free Charles!

BUI – breasteeding under the influence.

It’s buried in the story – even the Times can feel shame – but the French are currently kicking our asses in the ass-kicking department.

That. Is. Not. Right.

Jails and prisons are largely useless, and most should be closed.

There are two things we can do with someone who violates social norms by committing crimes. If the crimes are sufficiently vile that society can never re-accept the individual, then the individual has to go away. That can be death or life imprisonment or exile. In any case, there is no need for rehabilitation; society is rejecting and expelling the person, not trying to fix them. If we decide not to kill these people (I can’t imagine why we would make that decision, but apparently other people feel differently), then we will need to keep some prisons around to warehouse them until they die of natural causes.

Those folks are a fairly small minority of all criminals, of course. For the people whose crimes are of a lesser magnitude, we want to do five things. First, we want to provide a disincentive for that particular individual to engage in the same act. Secondly, we want to deter other people who may think that engaging in that act is a rational course of action. Third, we want to be as fair as possible in measuring the severity of the punishment to the severity of the crime. Fourth, we want to rehabilitate the offender – to convince them to change the course of their life. Fifth, we want to satisfy the sense of justice of the community so that they continue to buy in to the social order we have established. If they don’t feel justice is done, they will withdraw their support for the instrumentalities of justice and simply take care of business themselves. That’s not an entirely undesirable outcome (direct democracy!) but we have collectively decided that it’s better to have cops and courts than lynch mobs.

Prison is not entirely worthless at these tasks, but it is not very good at them. It often fails the first two tests – it is not a strong disincentive or deterrent. Being in prison isn’t fun and games but it is often not much worse than the offender’s basic milieu. When you live in purgatory, a trip to Hell isn’t something you tremble at. Prison almost always fails the fairness test. Prison rape, gang violence, all the rest of it – these things make the actual prison experience brutally unfair. You go in for burglary and you get sodomized daily for three years and you emerge a broken shell; you go in for mass murder and your gang buddies lionize you and you emerge meaner and more antisocial than you entered.

Prison utterly fails the rehabilitative test; there are plenty of individual exceptions but in general a coerced, violent and thuggish environment is the worst possible background for education or counseling. About the only thing prison does even slightly well is the sense of justice; “he’s rotting in that hellhole and that’s where he should be” is satisfying to enough people to maintain support for the system.

So the prison system is not very good overall at its job for the non-expelled-from-society felons. What could we replace it with?

I would suggest the whipping post and the lash. Consider: direct physical pain is a profound disincentive for most people, soccer moms and gang-bangers alike; living in a rundown slum is no vaccine against getting the hell beat out of you. Seeing your friends come off the post weeping is a lot more of a deterrence than seeing them strut out of jail with new gang contacts and three squares. It would be much fairer and much easier to fine-tune punishments to crimes; three stripes is three stripes, and you aren’t going to be buggered as part of the bargain. The lash would satisfy the sense of justice of the community at least as well as jail.

It provides no direct rehabilitation, of course – but it does trigger the very powerful and natural human tendency to avoid behavior which is known to generate direct pain. If the tree-huggers insist, we could use the money freed up by closing most of the jails on rehabilitation centers which the offender would be free to use after their punishment – centers that would lack coercive mechanisms and would have to rely on actually convincing people to change to get results.

Summary: prison fails every test of its utility except for one. The lash passes every test except for one, and moving to the lash frees up resources that could be used to make genuine rehabilitation available to people who could live free, productive lives with a little help.

Bring back the lash! Its time has come again.