cruel and unusual punishment for crimes is not justice.

Torture is not justice.

This piece of dogshit deserves to spend the rest of his natural life in a prison cell, and no one is denying that. But we, as a society and as human beings, cannot permit ourselves to condone or support mistreatment of prisoners.

I lobby for the re-introduction of corporal punishment for lesser crimes. For petty theft, vandalism, assault, etc., the primary punishment should not be 30 days or 90 days or 1 year in prison, but 30 floggings with the cane.

Why?

Because 30 days in prison will fuck up your life. 30 days in prison, at minimum wage, is a $1300 fine: K-Mart legally must pay $8.25/hr now, and missing 4 weeks of work is missing $1300. Spending 30 days in prison can lose you your job, easily. Spending 30 days in prison can miss your rent, can remove the lifeline that buys food for your family, and can send you out on the streets.

30 days in prison for shoplifting a $15 DVD or, worse, $8 of Campbell's Soup, can relegate you to homelessness and hunger, mental illness, injury, loss of security, months or years or a lifetime of further entrapment in a situation where you cannot get a job and thus income to support yourself, and death by exposure to the rain and snow and rats and food you're eating from the trash can.

30 days in prison, to the bottom of society, is worse than a thousand beatings. It is a psychological terror, a financial disaster; it is eventual physical harm; if you are not rich, it is the ejection of your person from society to go live as a street urchin; if you have children, it is the condemnation of your family by removing their source of financial support.

Prison is the worst, cruelest, most harmful form of punishment we could ever come up with for petty crime. We've comforted ourselves with these ideals about violence, told ourselves that it's okay to pull the feeding tube or to hold a person back while he watches everything he's worked for be destroyed, as long as we don't strangle him with our own hands or burn down his house and murder his children ourselves. We've called this civilization, called it enlightenment, called it being gentle and fair and better.

We've found ways to hurt people more while congratulating ourselves on our magnanimity and gentleness.

As long as it's not bloody, as long as we don't have to hear their screams, we're quite proud of ourselves for finding even worse ways to damage people we don't like.