This has been a crummy news week for me. Maybe the rest of you can find excitement in reading about Olympic athletes falsely claiming to be robbed to cover up an act of vandalism, but my feeling is, it’s way past time to put old college memories behind me.
Similarly, Trump was reported as saying he regrets some words he’s used so far in the campaign, but he isn’t saying which ones. This also reminds me of college. I regret one or more of the wine parties, the rum and pot party, the other wine party, the parties I don’t remember and various words that may or may not have been said in connection with one or more such events. But that’s not news.
By the way, instead of imagining how Trump looks naked, why don’t we collectively imagine his income tax returns?
Happening just in time to bring Hempfest slightly down, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced it wouldn’t stop treating pot as if it were as bad as heroin.
That’s not news. That’s the opposite of news. It is an example of a negative news story. It does not tell us news; it deprives us of news. It dangles a newsy looking thing in our faces and we snatch at it and claw for it and race around after it and when we finally catch the thing, it’s just a piece of cloth with a face sewn on it.
Even one of the most newsworthy of news stories this week has elements of negative newsivity in it. I am speaking of the Department of Justice’s announcement that it will stop making use of private prisons.
When I look inside this glob of story, I find a deprivation of news.
Explanations given for not using private prisons were such things as “do not save substantially on costs,” and “do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” as publicly owned prisons. Nothing to do with the real reason they shouldn’t be used, namely that they exist to buy and sell human debt and therefore amount to slavery institutions, and their existence distorts the criminal justice system by making it profitable to incarcerate people who don’t need to be.
No, the reason the DOJ is giving us is that the private prisons are just not cheap enough for what you get.
That’s not an argument to do away with private prisons. It’s an excuse for taking the contracts away from companies like Corrections Corporation of America, and handing the contracts over to Wal-Mart instead.
Wal-Mart knows how to save substantially on costs. Don’t pay your workers anything. They probably got the idea from looking at how prisons exploit their inmate labor, but they’ve taken it to a whole higher level.
Maybe what we need is one huge prison for everyone. Think of the savings. Disney could set it up. Everyone would be a prisoner, including the guards.
We can pass a new law, one that makes air a Schedule I controlled substance. That way everyone alive in this country would be a drug criminal just for breathing.
We have one big trial to establish the fact that we are all guilty, and we all are sentenced once and for all to Prison World, where we will remain until we are rehabilitated (i.e., stop breathing).
After the one trial no more trials will ever be needed again, for an enormous cost savings. Having the prison in one place (I’m thinking New Jersey) would eventually save on transportation costs.
My idea would end the racial disparity in U.S. incarceration rates. There would be no disparity at all, since the rate would be 100 percent for every racial and ethnic subgroup.
Politicians and white-collar criminals would finally be behind bars where they have belonged all along.
A lot of expensive government bureaucracy could be eliminated. No more elections because nobody would have the right to vote. No more IRS: no one would make enough money to report.
Because we will all be in prison together, including the builders, we will have to build the walls from the inside. That won’t present any new difficulties for us. We’ve been trying to wall the nation off for over two centuries. This would be easier.