There Comes a Point When You Have to Address Your Failures

Connie du Toit has written an uncomfortable piece that reminds me, once again, that it took us decades to get to where we are, and stopping the slide isn't something we can accomplish overnight, if we can even accomplish it at all. Excerpt:

(In a California prison,) There were about 3,000 prisoners and about 800 guards. That’s a 2.66 to 1 ratio.

With a 2.66 to 1 ratio the guards are unable to stop people from killing each other and they can’t keep out contraband (weapons, drugs, etc.).

If we can’t keep people from killing each other in prison and controlling drug trafficking in THERE, how in the fcuk do we think we’re going to control (it) out HERE?

Another example of cognitive dissonance, where reality doesn't match the ideal. And, I am also reminded of Heinlein's Starship Troopers exposition on "History and Moral Philosophy," particularly when it comes to crime and "juvenile delinquency" leading to adult criminality. By the time a violent teen reaches adulthood, as Connie points out, they're unrecoverable. There is no rehabilitation. The most we've been able to do is lock them away from the people they would otherwise victimze, and then watch them victimize each other.

Theodore Dalrymple's City Journal piece The Frivolity of Evil illustrates the result of decades of consequenceless behavior in England - casual, thoughtless, evil behavior. This is the petri dish in which the occupants of that prison are cultured.

Connie's first recommendation:

We are going to have to start killing people. We’re going to have to start getting serious about culling the damn herd.

Now I’m not talking about killing people indiscriminately or blowing up government buildings in a Timothy McVeigh action. If you think that’s what we need to do, here’s a suggestion: Find a high bridge and jump off of it. If you think we’re at the point where we start mowing down each other in the streets or blowing up government buildings, I don’t want to know you. I want you to be struck by lightening or have a heart attack or something. Just go away and don’t ever come back—and don’t visit my site again either.

What I mean about killing people is that when prison guards are watching one gang attack another person on the quad, I don’t want them to get out mace or water canons anymore. In prisons like the one in that documentary, full of hardcore life-time criminals, I want them to shoot them when they act up.

The idea that a prisoner doesn’t feel he has anything to risk by committing a crime in prison means we have to give them something to risk. Since the only thing we have left to take from them is their life, well guesses what Batman, it’s time to start shooting them.

Rough, but she's right. Actions have to have consequences, and the only consequence left when what you have is the equivalent of a rabid human is to put the rabid human down.

But unless we address "the frivolity of evil" that generates rabid humans, we're not going to fix anything. And I have no clue how to reverse that problem. Especially when the majority of people don't want to look at the problem, much less address it.