Thursday, February 2, 2017 Groundhog Day
[1800 - USS Constellation (Captain Thomas Truxtun commanding) defeats La Vengeance]
[1876 - Major League Baseball's senior circuit,
The National League is formed]
[1875 - Friedrich 'Fritz' Kreisler, violin virtuoso, composer, born in Vienna, Austria]
[1882 - James Joyce, writer, poet, born in Dublin, Ireland]
[1895 - George "Papa Bear" Halas, Pro Football Hall of Fame player, coach, owner, founder born in Chicago]
[1901 - Jascha Heifetz, violin virtuoso, born in Vilna, Lithuania]
[1905 - Ayn Rand (Alissa Rosenbaum), social critic, writer, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia]
[1912 - Burton Lane (Levy), composer, songwriter, born in New York City]
[1923 - James (Lafayette) Dickey, poet, born
in Atlanta, Georgia]
[1927 - Stan Getz (Stanley Gayetzby), jazz musician, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]
[1947 - (Ferrah) Farrah Fawcett, actress, born in Corpus Christi, Texas]
[1959 - Vince Lombardi, signs five-year contract
as head coach of Green Bay Packers]
In 2007 the Sacramento Bee reported that the average annual cost of housing an inmate in the California prison system was $43,287 per year. Like just about everything else, this expense goes up each year. Another way of looking at the cost is that it takes about $120 per day to house the least productive members of our society. With a recidivism rate above 70%, and an increasing penal population, California was preparing to build a number of new prisons and staff them with correctional officers who can make a salary of more than $73,000 per year, plus benefits. The State of California at that time incarcerated 172,000 inmates in 33 prisons (and other facilities), many of which were packed to more than twice their designed capacity. Things are not much different in the rest of the Country where more than one out of every hundred adult citizens of the land of the free is in jail.
There are plenty of single parents in our workforce who are supporting themselves and their children on less than half what it costs our society to keep a single prisoner locked up. Part of the increase in the cost of warehousing the least desirable elements of our society has gone into providing these felons with improved health care. Many of our citizens in the working classes are still without insurance and are forced to forego health care for themselves and their families.
One wonders how our country can remain competitive in a global economy when our priorities are so crazy that it costs more to imprison a citizen than it does to gainfully employ one. Perhaps we should begin outsourcing criminals to India instead of sending that country thousands of jobs previously held by working Americans. Not only could the Indians keep our prison population for a fraction of what it costs us to do so here, but there is a certain deterrent value in the prospect of serving time outside your native land. On the other hand, we might try treating our drug addicts instead of locking them up, which would cut the prison population down to a manageable number.
William's Whimsical Words:
When individual felons receive more of the resources of a society than do members of the working class, and prison guards make twice what many teachers do, it may be time to ask who put the inmates in charge of the asylum.
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