Idlewild

Here's the thing: jails are just the worst idea ever. What says "recitivism" like "let's put a bunch of one-time burglars in a cage with murderers and bigamists and outright paltroons"? (Bigamists being, of course, the single greatest threat to civilized society since Joseph Smith's golden eyeglasses.)

I was talking to my wife about this while doing dishes with her after dinner (an effective antidote, in every manner, to bigamy). She pointed out that the view that everyone just needs some peace and love and grace is a trifle too idyllic for the real world. I know that sounds terrible, but I guess you need to teach high school to really realize that grace isn't grace if people take advantage of it time and time again.

So here's my idea: Maybe we should amend Teddy's famous dictum to "Speak lovingly, and carry a big stick." But even if you keep a big stick somewhere in the justice system (I guess that's what it's supposed to do, anyway--stick it to ya, sucker!), jail sentences are way too overplayed. In other words, the justice system is too monochromatic--it's both too easy and too hard at the same time. Whether you murder someone or steal their lunch money, it's the slammer, all the same. Sure, you get different lengths of sentence, but life in a cage is pretty dehumanizing no matter how long it lasts. I think. So I've been told. It's like a one-size fits all approach to punishment.

And it also seems like it's the worst possible way to combat recitivism and to rehabilitate a "criminal" (gotta love that branding that comes with a criminal record) back into tango with social norms. That's where Colson's "restorative justice" bit comes in. If we can reconnect victims and crime (in certain instances--certainly not all), we might actually be able to treat criminals as human beings. If an errant accountant at Arthur Andersen is forced to pay back all the money he stole from stockholders, it might not only put a human face on the effects of his deeds, but also provide him a meaningful way of paying for his crime in a way that injects him back into community, producing something useful and violable from within society in order to get back on track.

I dunno. Seems like it may be sometimes a lot more effective to get people back into society and making them accountable to it by actually making them work within it to recover their place, instead of just putting them in a box somewhere on Alcatraz and hoping that 20 years' consorting with like-positioned aliens altogether apart from society will make them better able to live within it.

Isn't community the thing we all need, anyway? Why give "criminals" a lousy one on purpose, when we could be injecting them into something so much more human--so constrictive as to be free?