Johnny Adams asked, “If winning is
the goal of the libertarian party, then what about liberty? It seems spreading
liberty is no longer the end, winning is.”
Then I went and bitched about those
who prefer the state running some parts of our society as if I know it all.
Well there is one thing I don’t think the private sector should run and that’s
our prison system.
I figure if I we want to take away
someone freedom then for whatever reason we need to find a way to do it without
handing the person over to a profit making group that has ever reason to push
for more laws so that more people will then become subjects in private prisons.
For one thing there are far too many
laws on the books and it is too easy to break one or more every day.
Prosecuting attorneys love to throw
the book at people and pile on the violations. This is especially true of low
income violators where they can get someone to plead to a lesser charge and
avoid a trail. The prosecutor then gets to claim a conviction whereas some well
to do guy will hire some good legal help and fight the charges. Poor people too
often don’t have a chance in our legal system.
Then there are a lot of alternatives
to jail that we are not even trying. We definitely need to find a way to hold
mentally ill people who have offended others without using our prison system.
There are also a lot of ways to deal with those who have committed non violent
offenses without locking them up that we haven’t tried.
And our juvenile justice system, if
you can call it that, needs to be over hauled instead of locking people up. I
recall reading a few years ago about one of the Native tribes who sent their
young violators out to an island off shore for a year to think about what they
had done.
I suggest we work on these solutions
before we take away someone’s civil liberties. Then maybe we won’t have so many
bad apples to toss.
This was originally posted on FB as
a reply.
Thank you.