For Profit Prisons. What could POSSIBLY go wrong.

My thoughts on this:

http://www.examiner.com/article/pennsylvania-judge-sentenced-to-28-years-prison-for-selling-teens-to-prisons

If you still think privatized prisons are a good idea, just go ahead and unfriend me now. THIS is exactly why privatized, for-profit prisons are a TERRIBLE idea.

Our courts should never be a source of profit. There should never be any incentive for anything other than serving justice in our judges.

Given the extreme violation of his public trust, I would have no problem what so ever seizing everything he owns to pay some restitution to those unjustly imprisoned. Hell, if he's going to be in prison for life, he won't need any of it.

None of this $1.2 million crap that averages out to $240 per person. Take every last thing the man has. Not punitively, but to try to pay back as much as possible of what he stole from those people.

And yes, I know some of them may have been legitimately imprisoned, just... expedited. Still, in the expediting process, he skipped over important protections our society provides.

I'm sitting here, and I honestly can't think of a punishment that I'd think was out of line. I can think of some I wouldn't personally ADVOCATE, but if it were to happen, I wouldn't argue in his favor...

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There's ANOTHER reason to point out to the "privatizing is better" crowd: Each of these cases (or at least, those who would not otherwise be found guilty in a fair trial, or who would have received lighter sentences if there weren't a bounty) are costing taxpayers money.

Each one of these people is now in the prison system, and the privatized jail model doesn't mean we don't have to pay for it, it just means we pay on a "per inmate per day" basis rather than a "time and materials" basis. So each day one of these wrongly convicted or up-punished kids spent in jail is one more bit of money going from the taxpayers.

Which means even if the jail is run more efficiently than the government can do it (an assertion about which I've seen numerous studies indicating that it's not actually true, which makes sense if you think about it, if you can't do something for less than $x dollars, how can you turn it into a for-profit model, add in the overhead of profit margin, and come in UNDER $x), that difference was almost certainly more than made up for by the increased bed count in the prison, paying for inmates that under a fairer system would not have been there.

And finally, I have to say, I'm a little afraid of the slippery slope. I know slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes, but really, if we privatize the jails, is it really that much of a stretch to believe someone might suggest privatizing the courts as well? And if that happens, can you not see people shopping around for a court the way one shops around for a lawyer, choosing the court that has a history of finding in the direction you want them to find?

This whole thing is a huge travesty of justice, brought to us by greedy people who have reaped all of the benefits of the system we had, and can't conceive of either being expected to pay to continue to support the system that got them where they are, or that these things aren't just magically delivered by fairies, if we stop paying for them, they WILL stop happening.

Until we view basic health care as a human right instead of a fungible commodity, nothing will change.

We need a single payer system. In spite of the horror stories opponents like to tell (as if there's any country-sized system anywhere that's not going to have a few examples of problems), in most of those countries if you asked them if they'd like to exchange their system for ours, overwhelmingly people say "no".

Honestly, I really feel like we have it TOO GOOD in this country, and those who believe the government does nothing well and stands in the way of personal liberty have lost sight of all of the things they don't have to worry about BECAUSE our government handles them so well and so efficiently. To be part of a society, you have to have a social contract. And to have an effective social contract, you have to have a way of enforcing and administering it. That is government.

Last night, my girlfriend and I were discussing this, and we sort of came up with the idea that anyone who is against health care reform and a single payer system should spend a year living in Germany or the UK and get sick at least a couple of times while doing it. And anyone who continues to believe that government does nothing well and is just an inhibitor on "liberty" should spend a year in Somalia or some other country where you've got all the damned liberty you want, no one restricts your ability to do anything you want. See if that's really more to your liking.

Honestly, these people have lived their entire lives living with the benefits of our society, the benefits our government, and our unions, and our level of socialization has purchased for them, that they honestly do not believe that being given an anarchy-level of freedom would result in society changing at all.

It's like someone who had never gone hungry a day in their life talking about how unimportant the supply line for food is. They simply cannot conceive of the concept of hunger, and so the consequences of losing the thing they think is unimportant are just not recognizable to them.

Wealth

My friend Frank Dana posted this on Facebook.  He said he was himself stealing it from a comment someone made elsewhere, but he did not name the other person, so I can't name them here, either.

But this goes so much more eloquently to the reasons why I think our disparity of wealth is such a bad thing that I had to share it.

I will have some comments of my own at the bottom.  The stuff in bold italics is quoted and not original to me.

...Why do we tolerate mega-wealth? — Not mere millionaires, but really obscene, couldn't-possibly-use-it-all accumulations of untold multiple billions of dollars? Your Bill Gateses your Saudi sheiks, your Apple Computers. (And this isn't about Apple's corporate value, but its _wealth_ — some say they could be sitting on as much as $100 billion.) Societally, I mean, why do we accept, admire, even praise the "achievement" of consolidating so much wealth into the control of one entity?

If your small fishing village was experiencing a famine, or if your country had instituted wartime rationing of food, it wouldn't be considered "okay" for some morbidly obese glutton to be stuffing himself to death with food while everyone around him fought not to starve. Even if he obtained the food fairly, heck even if he produced every bite of it himself, it would still be viewed as _shameful_ to be wallowing in such excesses of consumption. It wouldn't have to be illegal, or even "wrong", to be viewed as morally lacking, and most people would take a dim view of someone with such a gluttonous appetite, and so little self-awareness or empathy for the other members of the community. Fatso would get the stink-eye, for sure.

Yet, when someone scrapes together a pile of gold big enough to choke the Nile and shoves it in their basement, we marvel at their achievement and praise their "success", as if what they've accumulated are merely points on a scoreboard, and not actual, fungible resources. (Money, dammit, IS a commodity, if perhaps a uniquely volatile one.) Why do we drool over Apple's $100 billion corporate bank account, and devour breathlessly-written pieces on what a "problem" they have trying to figure out how to spend all that cash, without even raising the question of whether their massive wealth is a good thing? How could it not be, right?

Wouldn't it be appropriate (perhaps even more appropriate) to instead react with something like, "Holy shit, Apple so overprices their products, and/or underpays their employees or suppliers, that they're sitting on $100 billion in CASH from being the peddlers of wildly unnecessary digital toys."? Why would it be wrong to consider their massive wealth and the process by which they achieved it just as gluttonous, shameful, and reprehensible as our theoretical food-hoarder?

Or, take Bill Gates. Now, he's done a lot of really amazing things with his wealth, things which are undeniably praiseworthy. I have absolutely no desire to diminish the incredibly generosity he's demonstrated, with his incredibly vast personal fortune. But, thing is, he didn't HAVE to do that. (Which makes it all the more laudable, of course.) He could just as easily have sat on the entire $70+ billion or whatever it was, or swam around in it like Scrooge McDuck. So, why would we (again, societally) favor people having that option? Why was it even "okay" that he became worth so much to begin with, regardless of what he did or didn't ultimately choose to do with the money? Why are we so unquestioningly worshipful of financial gluttony?



I love this take on it.  I usually focus on the difference is value to society and level of effort, and conclude that I simply do not believe a CEO works 300-400 times harder than the average employee at their company.  I certainly don't believe (what with golden parachutes and the like) that CEOs take any more risks than the people below (who oddly seem to often be the ones who take it in the shorts, thus earning the CEO a huge bonus).  And given the performance of a lot of CEOs, it doesn't even seem to be pay-for-performance or pay-for-excellence, it seems to largely be "Find a random person with an MBA, dump a wagon load of cash on them, and pray that they don't fuck up too badly".

Similarly, I do not see what it is that hedge fund managers do that's worthy of hundreds of millions of dollars, and SO worthwhile to society that they deserve to have that income taxed at a much lower rate than anyone else.

That hedge fund manager certainly does not work harder than the construction worker pulling long shifts building bridges or paving roads.  Arguably doesn't provide more to society.  And certainly hasn't risked more.  And yet there they are with the piles of loot and arguing that they shouldn't be taxed any higher because damn it, they EARNED what they have, and they deserve it all.

But I very much like this other way of looking at it.  We watch the TV show "Hoarders" and laugh at or pity the people who feel a compulsion to keep everything, to just amass STUFF.  Someone sitting in their house with every newspaper they ever bought is crazy, but someone sitting on an equivalent pile of money, gathered long after every conceivable need for more had been met, simply because they have a level of greed that demands that they take ever more... this is not laudable behavior.  It is sick.

Do we all want to be rich?  Most of us do, yeah.  And I don't fault people who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to actually get there for taking that opportunity.  But I also don't feel at all bad for someone sitting on an income of a hundred million dollars if we ask them to give half of that back.  They're STILL almost certainly vastly overpaid for their level of effort, risk and value to society.

How One Atheist (or Agnostic) Sees The World

A Christian asked me the following questions in a discussion over religion and atheism, and I wrote the answer below, and I liked it enough to want to save it in a more easily accessible location than Facebook.

The questions:

Just how do you determine what is right or wrong without God? And what do you do about guilt and what is the purpose of guilt? Do you think there is a difference between people and animals? Do people have souls?

And my answers:

OK, in order... to me, good and evil is based largely on empathy and unwilling harm done to others. So to me, it is evil to murder someone (you're taking away their life without their approval), but it is not evil to assist someone in suicide (for instance, if they're a terminal patient, assuming the person is making a fully informed decision and hasn't been coerced or misled into the decision).

I do not find "victimless" crimes to be particularly bad, except when they're "victimless" only in that you happened to not hurt someone. (For instance, I don't have any problem with consensual sodomy in any form, but I think drunk driving is evil, because drunk driving MAY be victimless, most of the time, but it puts other people at serious risk due to YOUR risky behavior, and the times that it ISN'T victimless can be pretty extreme). I'd be open to discussing whether drunk driving should be treated as never victimless and punished whenever it's found, or whether we should say "No, if you don't hit anyone, you're fine, but if you kill someone and you're found to be drunk, you face the death penalty", aka make it only a crime if you ACTUALLY hurt someone, but make the punishment so extreme that no one wants to risk it.



And it isn't the HARM that's the problem, it's the harm done to someone against their will. And by that I mean that I think it's STUPID to play Russian Roulette, but if a group of people wants, of their own accord and with no coercion, to play the game, I don't think that's EVIL, even though some of the participants will almost certainly die. No one there dies who didn't know it was a possibility and who didn't willingly join into the game.

So that's a very simplified view of my take on right and wrong.  But honestly, it's a "do unto others" situation. If I wouldn't want it done to me, or if a reasonable person wouldn't want it done to them even if it's not something I mind, then in general, doing it to someone against their will is bad. It doesn't require the threat of a God to recognize that, nor the teaching of a religion to make clear what should be obvious to every normal human being.

Question two I don't understand. What do I do about guilt? I feel guilt the same way anyone else feels guilt. Some more so, some less so, but guilt does not, IMO, come from religion (although some religious people convince themselves that the source of their guilt is "shame before God"). But I don't know what you mean by "what do you do about it and what is the purpose of it". What is the purpose of any emotion? What is the purpose of happiness? Sadness? Excitement? Envy? I'm sure they all have biological purposes, at some point each of those emotions in some way enhanced the chances of survival of those people who had it over those who did not. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's some grand universal "purpose".

Do I think there's a difference between people and animals? I struggle with this one all the time. Clearly we sort of have to dismiss that to some extent, or we'd never be able to eat meat, but that might be an intentional and necessary blindness rather than a reality. Certainly families that have dogs don't like to see their animal mistreated or harmed, or get sick. We know some animals can learn, which means there's intelligence there. But I am leery of getting into the "relative intelligence" debate, because that's a slippery slope to the "Ok, if it's intelligence, then are mentally challenged people less human than average humans? Are Mensa members MORE human than average?"

So... I can't really answer that. I try not to inflict any unnecessary pain or mistreatment upon animals, because there's no reason to be cruel, but I am not a vegetarian, so clearly I've convinced myself it's OK to eat them, or at least some of them, and I'm not above squashing a beetle or spider in my house or swatting a fly or a mosquito, and I wouldn't be at all happy doing any of those things to a fellow human being, even one in a persistent vegetative state (aka no more aware or intelligent than animals may be).

Do people have souls? Define souls. To my way of thinking, we don't yet completely understand the nature of awareness. What exactly is going on in the brain to make us aware? I don't mean WHAT we're aware OF, but THAT we're aware at all. I know you can make people have hallucinations by stimulating various portions of the brain, so certainly the brain is involved, but what aspect of the brain makes awareness happen? I don't believe we know, scientifically. And so that old "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" argument kicks in, and lacking any better answer, I suppose you can call that "a soul" until we discover a better answer for it.

Remember, I'm agnostic, not atheist, which means I'm honestly not sure if there's anything after death. I don't think it likely involves God in any way that human beings currently conceive of the concept, but we have ZERO experience of people coming back who have gone FULLY through that door for more than a few seconds.

Let's analogize to one of those one-way, full-height turnstiles in subways. You are in a building and you see one of those that leads into another part of the building, and you have NO idea what's over there. You do know that you've seen people go through it, and the only people who have come back didn't really go FULLY through it, and they report having seen things on the other side, but clearly their view wasn't much better than just standing next to the turnstile.

What's on the other side? You can't see. You have no reliable testimony from anyone who has been there. So all you can do is speculate. It could be a wild party, so much fun no one even considers leaving. It could be filled with poison gas and the moment you're out of sight down the hallway, you die. It could be that you're just trapped there and no one comes back because no one can get out. It could be that there's another exit out of the building on that side, and no one comes out because they leave the building and go home and you just don't see them.

Death is, to me, the same way. The number of possibilities I can think of is myriad and of course includes the very real possibility that this is it, when we die our consciousness is extinguished along with our body, and that's just the end of it. My ego doesn't like this answer, because ultimately I think it's human nature to reject the idea that we are not the center of the universe or somehow essential to it... but just because we don't like something isn't reason to believe the contrary. I don't like that I'm going to die one day, but that doesn't mean I get to believe that I'm immortal.