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Although most of us were taught in our youth that
crime doesn't pay,
recent developments seem to
indicate otherwise.
This struck me the other day after some missionaries approached the house. Under those circumstances, I normally turn the dog out, close the curtain, lock the door and pretend that I'm not home.
But they were too close for that sort of protective
rudeness, and I had to endure their questions, among them
How would you like to live in a world without death,
disease or crime?
I explained that I was, in some respects a journalist, and that in such a world, I would be out of work and in danger of starvation. That put them on their way.
This works for me with certain missionaries, but not all. One friend used to invite the proselyters in, offer them coffee or apple juice, and then drag out his college biology and geology textbooks to support his impassioned effort to convert the missionaries from creationism to evolution. The proselyters fled as soon as decently possible, and never returned.
My mother-in-law used a similar but kinder tactic. Upon moving to a new neighborhood, she would meet the Mormons and tell them that she was quite busy at the moment, but would be glad to peruse their literature. She told the Jehovah's Witnesses the same thing.
When the Mormons returned, she would ply them with Witness literature as though she were trying to convert them. When the Witnesses came, she was a Mormon bent on adding to the flock. Neither ever returned, and she could continue her Methodist ways without missionary interruptions.
Back to crime. A world without crime would put a lot of
people out of work, and in modern America, it would lead to
economic disaster. For the past 30 years, we have elected
law and order
candidates who promise to lock them
up and throw away the key
or three strikes and
you're out.
Occasionally campaign promises are kept, and so we have record numbers of people in prisons. Prisons are expensive to build and operate, and even if Americans like to put criminals in prisons, Americans also prefer low taxes.
The solution? Make the prisons pay their own way.
Our sheriff recently announced that errant citizens will no longer be able to stay in jail for free. He plans to charge a sliding fee of $5 to $25 a day.
Granted, it costs more than that to keep somebody in the slam, but once the principle is established, the custody fees will rise to a more reasonable $100 to $200 a day.
Many prisoners don't have all that much money, but Sun day's Post showed another way to augment the revenue stream.
Prisoners make phone calls. So the jailers, in co-operation with telephone companies, set up systems wherein every call, even a local call, is an expensive collect call.
When Criminal Cousin Jed calls you from the county cooler, which may be only a few blocks away, it could still cost you 50 cents a minute, and the sheriff's office gets a big piece of that (so big that they don't want to talk about it). It thus becomes expensive to be on speaking terms with an inmate.
Then there's prison labor. Forget the chain gangs -- they're just for show and the Give Alabama a Third Senator with Gale Norton Campaign -- and note that California is leading the way in making prisons pay for themselves.
In 30 states, including Colorado, prisons contract with corporations to provide labor. The company generally pays at least minimum wage, but about 80 percent of the money goes to the prison to cover room, board, restitution, etc.
The results in California should allay fears about NAFTA
and U.S. jobs going to low-wage factories in Mexico. DPAS,
a data-processing company, closed an operation in Tecate,
Mexico, and moved the work to San Quentin. We have a
captive labor force .... That makes the whole business
profitable,
explained DPAS owner Bob Tessler.
Prisoners aren't forced to work for these private companies. But one DPAS employee noted that state-run prison industry jobs pay only 30 cents an hour, and that the meal chow so terrible that it must be supplemented with edible food purchased from the commissary. The only way to earn enough, he said, was to process Chevron data for DPAS.
So we seem to have this marvelous economic cycle in place. First we criminalize many activities that were perfectly legal for our grandparents.
The increase in crimes means an increase in criminals. If they're just locked away, eating bread and water and breaking rocks, they're a drain on the economy. So we charge them for room and board, and collect a rake-off from the outside world whenever they make a phone call. If that doesn't produce enough income, then we hire them out and collect most of the proceeds.
Who said crime doesn't pay? The next time the missionaries come by, tell them that crime is becoming an important profit center for our beleaguered governments and that we can't afford to eliminate it.
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