Speech-crime and punishment

Crime and punishment

Punishment is the act of making someone suffer for a fault or crime. The purpose of inflicting penalty is to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the same offence.

The reality, of course, is that it seems to be getting more and more difficult to put criminals behind bars. This leads directly to a growing disregard and disrespect for the law.

This should hardly be a surprise. Why think twice about committing a crime if you have little reason to fear the consequences?

Today's "prisoner" seems to have little to fear. Many find themselves better off behind bars than they were on the street. Modern prisons seem more like country clubs than the classic notion of "prisons".

Prisoners are supposedly "repaying their debt to society". How can they be doing that if they contribute nothing to that same society while in prison? They need to be put to work.

There's an endless number of jobs that they could be doing to benefit society at large. For example, why let trash accumulate all over the landscape just because people don't want to take paying jobs to clean it up?

We also need to repair our system of "justice". Lately too many criminals get off for nonsensical reasons such as the infamous "temporary insanity" defense or by claiming some imagined racial injustice.

Allowing someone to get away with murder due to "temporary insanity" is, itself, insane. Ask the victims if they feel better knowing that their killers didn't know what they were doing at the time.

Also, any person who can suffer a bout of "temporary insanity" that would cause him to commit murder should be the *first* person to be locked up - not the last. One wonders how many murders are committed by people who are already planning their "insanity" defense.

What is happening now in the system of justice is unthinkable. The day of the Jackal will never end, unless we do something to put justice on a healthy basis.