On my AOL welcome screen today, there was a headline about a sex offender winning a multimillion dollar lottery jackpot. I'm sure why they think this is front-screen news, to coin a phrase (perhaps), is that I'm supposed to be...outraged?
I'm not sure exactly who I'm supposed to be outraged at. God, fate, or karma, for letting a Bad Person win a lot of money, when I (just a regular bad person, not a Bad Person) win jack shit? The state of (I think) Michigan for not somehow enacting laws that say convicted criminals aren't allowed to play the lottery? The judicial system for not locking him up forever and throwing away the key, so that simple pleasures like gambling would be forever beyond his reach?
I dunno. I am perplexed. I am also, I suppose you can tell, not outraged.
There's this very weird thing in our society where people commit crimes, take the punishment that is meted out to them, and then are just supposed to--what?--never be let back into normal society ever again. Can't get any kind of decent job, can't--in the case of sex offenders, anyway--be allowed to live anywhere near, y'know, other people, need to be ostracized from normal daily activities of life like, I dunno, buying lottery tickets. And then we are outraged when and if they re-offend and say they should never have been let out. I mean, perhaps it is just me, but I don't think this system is working.
Therefore, I propose we bring back the death penalty and mete it out for all offenses over and above traffic tickets and jaywalking. If we can't give an honest second chance to people who've served their prison time, we ought to off them and end their, and our, misery. Keeping 'em locked up forever is too damn expensive.
xoxo
5 comments:
As far as I can tell from actually reading the story, the fact that he had a nine year old sex configuration has fuck all to do with his winning the lottery. In fact, I wonder how any reporter even got hold of that fact. I guess that's the "human interest" in the story.
Though do you remember the story a little while back where some older guy in Massachusetts on parole won something like a $1 million on a scratch ticket and they wanted to put him back in prison because "gambling was a violation of his parole."
Jesus Christ, if the lottery is so dangerous to our public health, why does the state run it and advertise it constantly. Talk about bullshit moral hypocrisy.
I've been thinking about it, and it seems like "sex offenders" have become the most recent Red Menace. There's one lurking around every street corner and behind every mailbox, and you've got to keep them out of your town before they pollute the children...
I suspect it's also an outlet for the same kind of social anxiety about caring for children that led to the crazy nursery school abuse fantasies in the 1980s.
And, of course, they're an easy political target. You can't take on any regular minority groups anymore to show how big and tough you are, but you sure can pass one more regulation against sex offenders, cause who's going to march for them?
And by extension that applies to everyone who commits a crime. You're free to ostracize them because everyone wants to be "tough on crime"... no matter how minor or long ago or non-violent the crime was or how impossible it makes it for an ex-offender to ever live a normal life with a normal income.
I wonder if society was easier on ex-cons during and after the Depression, because times were so bad that most understood why someone might have been driven to crime through desperation... and many knew those who had and knew those who weren't hardened violent criminals, just people who had no where else to turn... and knew that a lot of others might have been in the same boat.
While you're at it, bring back public executions. A country that in so in love with NASCAR's flaming death wrecks should have no trouble watching the scum of the earth swing, or fry, or whatever method we're using this week. It would be the latest thing in reality TV.
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I just said that, like, yesterday (I believe it was during a discussion of Tila Tequila, haha)! We're *this* close to televised Christians-vs-lions type stuff.
The only place for reality TV to go from here is public executions or blood sports to the death, both of which would draw the ratings, I'm sure.
Aren't, like, auto racing and "ultimate fighting" pretty much already blood sports? Isn't that why a lot of people watch them... the real potential possibility that someone will be maimed or killed right in front of them live on TV?
Admittedly it's not guaranteed, like a public execution, but it's that frisson of potential death that keeps them watching.
Although I agree with the anti-death penalty advocates who say that executions should be on TV. If people are going to be killed by the state, shouldn't the population see what's being done in their name? If it's the right thing to do, why is it kept hidden and treated like it's something to be ashamed of?
And we know that public executions deter crime. Just look at all the public executions in Merrie Olde England... They were so successful at deterring crime in London that they sometimes used to have several executions a day just to make sure crime remained well deterred.
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