Who Is Threatening Whom? The prisons of this country are an extremely ugly joke, and need to be fundamentally reformed to become despotic, horrible places no one wants to go.
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The news here is filled with threats from imprisoned gang members (a) to create an "uprising" in four New Jersey prisons at the same time and (b) to murder the mayor-elect of my city, Newark, because he promises to get tough on gangs and the drugs they push.

Authorities said officers recently found three letters in the East Jersey State Prison cell of convicted murderer Lester Alford, an alleged leader in the gang known as the Bloods, detailing the plot.

"East Jersey State Prison" may not be familiar to many people. It is a newer name for what used to be called "Rahway State Prison", which might ring a bell, since is the site of a very famous program to deter young offenders called "Scared Straight". It was also, according to Wikipedia, where the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was incarcerated. It's not a place you would ordinarily want to spend much time in, but it is still too free for my tastes, if prisoners can, from within its confines, plot a four-prison "uprising" and the assassination of a major public figure.
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Prisons should be hopeless dungeons that destroy prisoners' will to defy society, to the point where their will to evil is crushed by terror of what society has already done to them and the even worse things society can easily do to them once it has them in its power. But who is afraid? Criminals? Or society? Who is more powerful?
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We live with many delusions, because the human race is, as I have said here on more than one occasion, feeble-minded, meaning that the human mind is easily misled into delusional belief systems and the absurd behaviors such delusions lead to.
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One of the delusions we live with is that we are helpless against crime. The exact opposite is true. We have the power to destroy crime, absolutely and beyond question. To crush it, to exterminate it, by crushing and exterminating the people even so much as inclined to commit it. Instead, we convince ourselves that we can't stop the drug trade, we can't suppress the Mafia — Mussolini did it, but we can't — we can't stop gangs from terrorizing our streets. Bullsh*t!
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Gangs are as nothing to us. We outnumber gangs thousands to one, and we have more guns, more clubs, more knives, more gas and gas masks and bulletproof vests — and military force. We have tanks and armored personnel carriers manned by a standing army of 1.2 million people! We have helicopter gunships and warplanes that can drop napalm on their ass. We are supremely powerful. Gangs are helpless against us.
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Do we act as tho we understand that? Alas, we do not.
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Even once we have arrested, tried, convicted, and confined criminals, they retain the delusion that we can't stop them. They continue to pursue criminal activities in the prisons we created to stop crime! And we tolerate that. We don't have to. We can make our prisons absolutely crime-free. We just choose not to.
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Well, it's time to choose to make our prisons, and our society, crime-free.
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Oh, we can't stop crimes of passion. There are always going to be some families blown away or stabbed to death by some parent or child who "loses it" and kills everyone. But that's not the bulk of our crime. Most of the crime that plagues our society and causes the bulk of the civilized world to hold us in contempt is crimes of profit, and those are extremely easy to suppress. You need merely make the cost of crime much higher than any possible gain, and, in extreme cases, kill the entire class of "people" inclined to such crimes.
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Gangs are especially easy to suppress, because they are organized. It is unorganized crime that is hard to suppress, because catching one criminal does not lead to capture of another, much less many others. But with a gang, you catch one, you catch 3. You catch 3, you catch 7. You catch 7, you catch 36, and before you know it you have as close to everyone as matters, because any gang members who remain can't do much of anything.
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It's so easy, both to destroy gangs and to kill prisoners. Piece of cake.
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And think about that: cake. We control everything every prisoner in every prison in this country eats. Any time we want, we can kill anyone we want in any prison in this country simply by poisoning his or her food. Easy. Easy as pie, or cake, or sandwich laced with cyanide. The simplest thing in the world.
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We don't have to warn them. We don't have to give them a date. We don't have to give them a fancy last meal. Any meal we choose can be their last meal, and they wouldn't know until too late, as their throat burns with caustic poison or they totter out of control instants after ingesting what we have made into their last meal.
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We are all-powerful. They have no power but what we grant them.
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Do we tell them,

Listen, moron. You're in prison. You couldn't escape us before, you can't escape us now. We control you. We can kill you — today — five minutes from now, two seconds from now — and there's nothing you can do to stop us. You are powerless against us. You're nothing as against us. We are everything. You are nothing. Got that?
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You'd better straighten up and fly right, or you are going to die here, and we will chop you up for parts for decent people. Shape up, or we will ship out what remains of your body, in a body bag, and burn it into ashes that we then dump in a forest with no tombstone, no plaque, no records of where the ashes were dumped. We might even take your face for a face transplant before we burn away every other proof that you ever existed.
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Your family will be so ashamed that they will never mention your name. Your neighbors will laff at the arrogance that brought you to an early end. And the world will be better for having killed you.

How do we restore sanity to society and its criminal element? It's actually pretty simple. As soon as anyone is arrested for a serious crime, such as gang activity or drug-pushing, you tissue-type him/her and say you are submitting the results of those tests to a national database of people waiting for organ transplants.
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You pass laws that make some crimes punishable by involuntary organ transplants. Remember the "eye for an eye" thing? We can perfectly well punish severe crimes by involuntary cornea transplants, one per customer or even two, rendering a heinous criminal completely blind for the rest of his miserable life.
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But of course, we could make that just the first step in the piecemeal dismemberment of incorrigible, permanent criminals. We can take one kidney and leave him or her alive with the other functioning kidney. We can take two lobes of the liver, leaving one to regenerate back into three. A few years down the line, we can take two lobes again. We can make our prisons into reservoirs of harvestable organs for decent people. And when we have removed all we can remove without killing the 'patient', we can then go on to harvest the rest, after we have killed the bastards, or as a process that in itself kills the bastards.
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Jack Kevorkian, "Dr. Death", has suggested that people convicted of capital crimes might profitably be executed by anesthetizing them on an operating table and removing all their usable organs and tissues, so they go to sleep like any other surgical patient, but never wake up. This is "lethal injection" with a plus: good people get to live while bad people die. The best of both worlds.
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The Constitution can't stop us. It is just paper, and is open to interpretation. The Fifth Amendment expressly permits capital punishment, and death on an operating table is just a form of constitutionally permitted capital punishment.
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Complaints have been voiced against Communist China for killing people needlessly to harvest organs for transplant to other people, and especially for sale to rich foreigners. The implication is that China kills innocents to steal their organs. But China has lots and lots and lots of common criminals who deserve to die as much as our common criminals deserve to die.
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Why should the Government of China, why should the Government of the United States or New Jersey or any other jurisdiction, waste the organs of 'people' killed for just cause?
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Is an organ taken from a Mafioso or street thug unworthy of transplant into a middle-aged teacher or 12-year-old child who would die without it? Is the recipient somehow tainted by receiving the benefit of a fully-warranted execution, of a terrible person who deserved to die? No, no, and no.
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The arrival of organ-transplant technology gives society the most powerful tool it has ever had to control crime, by absolutely terrorizing criminals into thinking that if they don't clean up their act, they are going to be chopped up for parts in their healthy youth. We should rejoice in that prospect. It's time criminals, not innocent people, shook in their boots from fear. It's time criminals were afraid to go outside, day or nite. It's time the good guys had the upper hand.
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That hand bears a scalpel.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,511.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:43 AM