Almost every day something comes up in the news concerning our penal system, be it union demands, inhuman treatment, cost of healthcare, whatever, I don”t think most people have any idea of the cost they have mandated the state to fund. The costs are humongous, taken on an even scale, far more costly than our defense spending. And it is all our fault. The combination of no guts, religious views of life, emotional views as opposed to objective/economic views, all have brought us to this point.
Good or bad, it is my belief that if a criminal is convicted of a felony, his rights are terminated. He probably should be thankful he is incarcerated and in this country, neither tortured or mangled. Yet many felons are allowed to lead a life as a prisoner that they probably could not manage as non-felons. At the lower levels of subsistence, the cost of keeping a prisoner in a state prison probably would enable two or three families to live better than they do. I simply do not think this is correct.
A number of people think my attitude and reverence for life is perverse. It worries me that the world already has more human beings than it can treat kindly, and, while we deserve to revel in living, life is a privilege and our desirability as a world citizen is a function of what we do to justify it, not a function of just being born. When a person gets to the stage where it costs their family and their community more to maintain them than they are able to contribute, it is time to consider going away, just as primitive cultures thought. Certainly felons fit this category. The fact that the people, in their wisdom, accept the costs to maintain people the state won”t turn loose on the streets baffles me. As far as I”m concerned, if every felon with a substantial sentence were to disappear, the only sad people would be the correctional officers who would lose their jobs. And I”m sure we could get over that.
With more that six billion people already on earth, I think the, largely religiously-based, concept of the sanctity of life is obsolete. There are now so many people on earth that the thought of the value contributed by that life becomes an important consideration. Perhaps it is time that the human race should consider trimming, much as the grape growers do, to encourage better and more productive growth. Back to the penal system. An explanation that what we are doing is correct is needed.
Guthrie “Guff” Worth
Lakeport
