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Breeder Reactors
Breeder Reactors?
Latest PLN just arrived - excellent issue - you should know that your piece on prison cost was even more correct than you let on. That prisons are, in effect, breeder reactors where young men come in and, by treatment, are turned into something much like plutonium. Since there is no real effort made on rehabilitation, more people who enter jail as grown men or women are trained and educated by pros to become further pros themselves when they get out. Once out, they can train the young and recruit them into criminal activity.
What with inflation and the upcoming economic collapse, there will be even more young people with no way of earning a living - along with a taxpaying population who will not want to pay $40,000 (which will increase with inflation) to house a junkie or mugger - did you say it would be cheaper to send prisoners to Harvard?
It seems obvious to me that changes in prison policy will have to be made quickly before the jails go bankrupt. If prisons try to compete economically with the outside world using cheap prisoner labor, they will only end up displacing "free" labor (as the term went back in the 1850s.) Sounds almost Marxism - a dialectic - large classes of 'offenders' will have to either be let out or will find many offenses suddenly of a non-criminal nature. George will lose his war on drugs - unless he can gel the Japs to pay for it, like he wants them to pay for our "war" with Iraq.
Of course, what is needed is intelligence, but this sort of it seems to be lacking - but then real genius does not seek to spend its life in the B.O.P - so they will bop till they drop.
Dick Treeman
Latest PLN just arrived - excellent issue - you should know that your piece on prison cost was even more correct than you let on. That prisons are, in effect, breeder reactors where young men come in and, by treatment, are turned into something much like plutonium. Since there is no real effort made on rehabilitation, more people who enter jail as grown men or women are trained and educated by pros to become further pros themselves when they get out. Once out, they can train the young and recruit them into criminal activity.
What with inflation and the upcoming economic collapse, there will be even more young people with no way of earning a living - along with a taxpaying population who will not want to pay $40,000 (which will increase with inflation) to house a junkie or mugger - did you say it would be cheaper to send prisoners to Harvard?
It seems obvious to me that changes in prison policy will have to be made quickly before the jails go bankrupt. If prisons try to compete economically with the outside world using cheap prisoner labor, they will only end up displacing "free" labor (as the term went back in the 1850s.) Sounds almost Marxism - a dialectic - large classes of 'offenders' will have to either be let out or will find many offenses suddenly of a non-criminal nature. George will lose his war on drugs - unless he can gel the Japs to pay for it, like he wants them to pay for our "war" with Iraq.
Of course, what is needed is intelligence, but this sort of it seems to be lacking - but then real genius does not seek to spend its life in the B.O.P - so they will bop till they drop.
Dick Treeman
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