Dear editor:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The alleged $19,000 per year per prison inmate is “progressive” hogwash and similar to the lobbying tricks we used to employ in the welfare establishment when we wanted more money. We would cite only the cash grant, deceptively omitting medicaid, food stamps, furniture and clothing vouchers, etc. I contend that it is twice that when you include the cost of building the prison; legal fees defending against “jailhouse lawyers” claiming abuse; an army of teachers, social workers, psychologists, etc; and the often-forgotten land that the prison is on that not only is taken out of productive taxpaying use (say, 100 homes or 50 businesses) but for miles around. The very idea of a prison tends to lower all sorts of values, i.e. property, moral, comfort, vocational, etc.
And that shameful propaganda plug for Charles “I’ll walk over my mother” Colson is jaundice writ large with the enlightening remark that “crime is more than a broken law.” Is it? Only to follow with the admission that “families are violated and injured.” And just when I was expecting draconian punishment, the dear soul said that “offenders” shouldn’t be “warehoused,” which is the liberal euphemism for equating a murderer with a jaywalker and apparently forgetting that no thuggish monsters are “accountable” because they don’t know what accountability is. They think that the population of the world is one and the other six billion of us are their fodder. “Their families lose their support” sounds forlorn and heartrending until you realize that our sage is referring to income from hitting people over the head!
W. North
