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Often I pass prison work details when I go about my business. Although we don't enjoy a real prison in Salida, we are inside America's Highest Gulag.
About 25 miles north, there's the Buena Vista
Correctional Facility and associated boot camp. Sixty miles
east lies the immense Cañon City complex, with the
new federal Alcatraz of the Rockies
in nearby
Florence.
The prisoners do much useful work here -- raking parks, planting flowers, improving trails, painting buildings -- and they also provide an example for children.
When my daughters were younger and we passed a work detail, I'd explain that the men in green overalls were all bad guys, while the guard toting the shotgun was a good guy. Children sometimes miss the point, though.
The main thing they observed was that most of the men in
green overalls were black, while the guard was white. It
looks like pictures in our schoolbooks of what the South
was like before the Civil War,
or What business do
we have applying sanctions against South Africa when you
can see this in America?
As a patriot and believer that prison payrolls are a great benefit to the community, I changed the subject when the children brought up such folderol.
In the future, we may see prisoners not merely raking leaves while under close observation, but felons chained ankle to ankle, toiling at arduous tasks like scything brush.
That's what Gale Norton, our attorney general, proposed last week in Grand Junction. She's running for the U.S. Senate, and how Colorado runs its prisons is none of the U.S. Senate's business, but why should we break tradition and let a little matter like the U.S. Constitution bother a political candidate?
In Norton's view (the concept isn't hers; she borrowed it from the governor of the enlightened state of Alabama, but to be a Republican candidate these days, you must donate your frontal lobes to the Old Confederacy), chain gangs would make prison terms so terrible that nobody would want to serve one.
During my 17 years of dwelling in the penal zone, I've heard of occasional escapes. But I've never heard of anyone trying to break into a prison. Some of those years were pretty lean, with high local rates of poverty and unemployment. If prisons, as they're currently run, were indeed that attractive, don't you think at least one person would have tried to break into one? Jump the fence, get into line, enjoy the delicious cuisine, the career opportunities and the splendid luxury behind the walls?
So her rationale seems rather specious. But maybe she hangs out with people who would want to break into prison -- my life here is rather sheltered, and I'm sure I don't see the broad cross-section of humanity that she encounters when she's hustling votes at county Republican dinners.
Another problem with bringing back the chain gang is that it contradicts a modern Republican tenet. They're always telling us that hard work at low wages is a patriotic duty (at least for the great masses whose improvident parents did not provide them with trust funds or degrees from prestigious universities), and now they're proposing the same exercise as a form of punishment. Perhaps Norton will settle this confusion in a future speech.
The chain-gang proposal may not be enough. A judge of my
acquaintance once noted that in small towns, the threat of
public humiliation is an effective deterrent. In ways, I
wish we still had public stocks for minor offences. A day
there would be a lot cheaper than 30 days in the
cooler,
he said, and I think people would go to a
lot more trouble to stay out of the stocks.
Nor should we should ignore the penology of certain
advanced states in the Middle East, where convicted thieves
have their right hands cut off. That's cheap and effective,
and despite what some bleeding-hearts might tell you, it is
constitutional. The Fifth Amendment says jeopardy of
life or limb,
which means that amputation, like
execution, is an acceptable punishment.
However, the chain gangs should come first. How do we deploy them for maximum benefit?
Traditionally, they break rocks in the hot sun. But it would be a waste of money to employ the convicts in make-work boondoggle projects, and to be honest, how many rocks need broken in Colorado? Thanks to years of mining, we already have immense piles of broken rock scattered throughout the state. And when rocks do get broken -- as with the granite floor at DIA -- the private sector seems quite capable of doing the job.
However, the ski industry has been whining about last winter, when business was off. They assure us that $50 lift tickets and $10 hamburgers had nothing to do with this. It was all our fault because we didn't clear Interstate 70 quickly enough.
So let's put Gale Norton's chain gangs to work shoveling snow along the interstate. And if they can't get the job done in time, we can always pass more laws to produce more shovelers. We've got to show that we're willing to do whatever it takes to stop crime and while keeping the ski industry happy.
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