AGENT ZERO AND OUR PRISON SYSTEM
January 18, 2010
By: Rev. Blue
If you’re a big sports fan, especially a hoops head like me, then you have heard all about Gilbert Arenas’ recent issues. To boil it down: the dude got busted for not having a license for handguns he brought to an NBA facility. He’s looking at anywhere between 6 months to 2 years of prison time.
This entire situation, with the analysts and columnists yammering on about it, has me thinking how broken and ineffective the prison system is at this point. I am no expert in law, or anything really, so I know my logic may be flawed or even flat-out stupid. It just got me thinking…
What is the purpose of prison? Is it to rehabilitate, to punish, a combination of the two?
Let’s take Arenas. The man called ‘Agent Zero’ in NBA circles signed a six-year contract worth $111 million dollars about eighteen months ago. That’s 111 followed by six zeroes. Six. If sending him to prison is punishment, that means the taxpayer will be paying for his stay. The man is worth MILLIONS. If we’re looking at ‘punishing’ him… why not hit him where it would really hurt? His wallet. The argument is “oh great – rich people never have to go to jail because they’ll buy their way out”. Good point, but I don’t mean some paltry fine he would get for criticizing refs. I mean millions of dollars. Imagine what that money could do for the taxpayers in the area? The crime is the key decision: this guy brought in guns without a license. Wrong? Absolutely. But if you posed this to the taxpayers and said “A man worth hundreds of millions carried an unloaded gun without a license. Should his punishment be you paying for him to sit in a prison or would you like him to give us millions to have this park fixed up/these certain roads repaved/etc.?” I would think they’d pick the latter. This man didn’t murder anyone. He wasn’t smuggling girls into the sex trade. This is where a JUDGE would make the decision. If we’re electing them and having them, you know, judge… then why can’t they, with their judicial mind, decide a better punishment, if that’s the purpose, than putting a person in jail for taxpayers to cover?
This is like Plaxico Burress and Bernie Madoff. Plaxico carried a gun, without a license, and shot HIMSELF in the leg. I know, I know “it could have been SO much worse” but it wasn’t. We can what-if anything. Make this guy pay in cold hard cash and be done with it. Bernie Madoff stole millions, perhaps billions (I don’t know all the facts) and yet he’s sitting in some posh federal prison. Are we really punishing him? Why not take all of him and his family’s possessions and THEN put the guy in jail? If our prison system is supposed to punish people then let’s punish them.
On the other side, for those not so rich, punishment should be labor. If someone committed a crime, how are we punishing them by sending them to prison to do nothing? My father-in-law is a prison guard and has told me the flat screen TVs they have, their hours to hang out, the lack of work they have to do, etc. If we want to punish them, why not create even larger types of ‘chain gangs’ to do labor? By that I mean there HAS to be some jobs in the community that could ease the taxpayers’ burden, right? Instead of them sitting in a prison and learning new techniques to commit crimes or get even more angered at ‘the man’ and ‘the sytem’… why don’t we work their tails off? That seems like a fair punishment for the prisoner and benefit for society.
For people who have murdered, either they should just be taken out to a firing squad and killed or need to work every day. I’m not supporting capital punishment or decrying it… but let’s quit dancing around the subject. Either you pull the Samuel L and say “yes they deserve to die and I hope they burn in hell!” or you think they should live. If they should live, how is life without parole punishing them? How is the victim’s family feeling justice? Why not have the person work and whatever money they would make go to the victim’s family? I’m lost on how our current prison system actually punishes, and not just enables and perpetuates, our prisoners.
What about rehabilitating Arenas? It doesn’t really make sense. He just made an absolutely idiotic decision. I’m not sure his crime, and his situation, is in need of rehabilitation but what about criminals that need rehabilitation? Why aren’t they getting it? That’s a far deeper issue than I have the knowledge for but I can tell you we, as a society, need to make sure we’re trying to rehab those that can use it.
We won’t get into the racism of prison sentencing. Crack, a drug predominantly used by blacks, carries a five-year mandatory sentence if you have FIVE grams of it on you. Powder cocaine, usually used by whites, carries the same sentence if you have FIVE HUNDRED grams of it on you. Five to five hundred?! But that’s another story for another day.
As you can tell from this writing, I am a huge proponent of smaller government, less taxes, etc. I think our prison system just creates better, and more vicious, criminals. And we pay for it. I think it’s time for us to stop that and I have just the agent of change in mind. Agent Zero.
