Offenders Should Face Consequences

Dear Ann Landers: Kudos for your comments about the futility of warehousing prisoners. Despite the wish of some of your readers to extract a pound of flesh, people need to realize that the victims of crime and our most hardened criminals are often one and the same.

I recently attended a conference on the link between the abuse of animals and violence against humans. One prison psychologist told of an inmate who, as a child, forgot to feed his father’s dogs one day. His father beat him, stripped him naked, fastened a dog collar around his neck and tied him in the backyard with the dogs. As the boy sat crying and shivering in the backyard, he saw his mother and sister watching from the house, also crying but too frightened to intervene.

Later, as an outlet for his rage, the boy killed the dogs. The boy grew up to become a rapist, the only outlet he could find for the rage he felt toward the women in his life who had witnessed his humiliation and done nothing to help him.

As long as society believes that punishing offenders will make them behave, our prisons, no matter how fast we build them, will be unable to accommodate all the criminals and our streets will remain unsafe. - New Mexico

Dear New Mexico: Violent crimes, such as rape and murder, generally are not perpetrated by people who have thought beforehand about the consequences. While psychiatrists and psychologists may come up with reasons for criminal behavior, these individuals must not be let off the hook. They are dangerous.

Those who are declared criminally insane should be put away permanently to protect society. Even though, as you say, punishing offenders will not make them behave better, they should be made to face the consequences of their anti-social behavior. Keep reading for more on this subject:

Dear Ann Landers: On behalf of the 2,500 members of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, thank you for your strong words against the warehousing of prison inmates. You are exactly right when you say that by helping inmates to become self-supporting and law-abiding, lawmakers would be in a “win-win” situation that would also result in a safer society for all of us.

The escalating prison population is a critical issue here in California, where there will be a projected 160,000 adult inmates by June 1998. Many of these inmates are locked up for non-violent crimes and low-level drug offenses that could be better punished by tough alternatives to incarceration. Taxpayers should question whether they want to continue to fund human warehouses at the expense of important services like higher education.

If more people demanded solutions to the crime problem, Congress and state legislatures would engage in a real debate about it instead of passing laws based on knee-jerk reactions. - Mary Broderick, Los Angeles

Dear Mary Broderick: Thank you for a reasonable wind-up to an emotionally charged subject. Building more prisons to warehouse non-violent inmates is not a sensible solution to the problem. There’s got to be a better way.

Dear Ann: I’m not from Wisconsin, but I have an explanation for why the intoxicated golfer was able to recover damages when he fell on a brick sidewalk that was in need of repair.

A California Supreme Court justice said it best: “Everyone is entitled to a safe sidewalk, even a drunk. And he is much more in need of one.” - Benicia, Calif.

Dear Benicia: Thanks on behalf of all the drunks in my reading audience.