I've here and there been complaining about our trip. As for example, the walk from the Southampton bus station to the Moxy Hotel. As challenging as that was, no comparison with what is happening in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine. Nor how people in general are doing in Africa, India, Middle East and poverty/dislocation sites the world over. 38 million Americans can be added to this group.
Regarding the USA, during these past few weeks I've asked around what people thought about how the country is doing, of Donald Trump and so forth. Views have been mixed. I've also noticed that in the countries we've visited, the roads are better, airports significantly more organized and newer, and public safety pretty good compared to too many places in the U.S. Yet, there remains a deep yearning that the U.S. is where many of them want to be. What's wrong with America? Nothing much that can't be fixed.
One factor about crime is that there is a sense of the U.S. losing control of law and order. How can so many get convicted too many times and return to prey on more victims? Our court system seems orchestrated to mostly protect criminals. To some degree, all the delays and excuses are glaringly revealing what some miscreant like Donald Trump can do. Even if he gets judged guilty, he will appeal, and all that could take years to come to any kind of conclusion. In our system, there seems to be more effort in trying to disprove guilt than not.
It's not that that we don't send convicts to jail. I wrote an article for the Huffington Post in 2011, A Simple Solution for Crime. To quote: we place more of our citizens in jail than any other country.
Yet, something is not right. Sure, our education system, more than train and prepare, has to produce good citizens. Then when you view how easily an obvious crook and cheat like Donald Trump can gain the support of half of Americans, you wonder what went wrong with our country.
That aside, crimes also occur for whatever reason, and nothing you can argue is that this can be justified. Yet, they happen, and as a result we should try to reform, rehabilitate and train a first time convict to gain a stronger footing for when this person re-joins society. This does not work well, for second-time convicts occur too often, and they are usually given longer sentences, We thus need to build more jails, hiring additional personnel, using more of our tax dollars. According to a study by David Anderson, the net burden of crime in the U.S. was $1.7 trillion/year, or $5667/person. There's got be a better way. Life sentences are especially painful for me, as we need to keep that individual chaperoned and accommodated in air-conditioned comfort forever. More waste of tax dollars.
We all know in baseball that after two strikes, the third occurs and you're out. The states of Washington and California sent convicts for 25 years to life. Their prisons, according to my HuffPo were then overbooked by more than a factor of two, compare to other states.
So here is what I long ago proposed as a simple solution for crime, something I called, Three Strikes and You're Dead (TSAYD). The Huffington Post refused to publish it, for this was too extreme. So on 13June2009 inserted it into this blog site.
First crime. Try to improve the convict as much as you can.- Crime #2 is committed and the defendant is judged guilty. Standard prison? Nope. Save your tax monies to build better school systems. Find some hellacious environment where the prisoner will need to support himself, and where the cost to society will be minimal. A mild form -- I was thinking more in terms of dungeons or caves.
Third conviction: termination! Yes, death. The U.S. has now had more than 1,000 executions since the Supreme Court ended a moratorium three decades ago. The transition will be messy, but under the TSAYD formula, this number could seriously increase in the first few years, but should decline with time. The odds are astronomically high that crime rates will significantly drop within the decade. Where are the supporting statistics? Probably none exists. I just feel this way.
Will the prospects of dungeons and death prevent crime? Or sure death? I ended this posting with:
Could a "Three Strikes and You're Dead" law ever be enacted anywhere in the world today? I hope not. But let me suggest that the concept be debated and considered, for, perhaps, a compromising intermediary first step might well be a more universal application of the Sheriff Joe penal system. However, after considerable public anguish, I would not be surprised if something a lot more draconian, but justified, actually is attempted. What somewhat worries me (because I am compassionate, honestly), though, is that many of my friends in casual conversation, with few exceptions, actually like the notion of TSAYD.
Maybe more surprising, and, possibly a clue on how society in general might react, were the responses from my "friends." To a person they all liked the proposal. I haven't had the time nor inclination to pursue this approach, but I think some next generation society might want to debate the merits and fashion a more efficacious legal mechanism to control crime. Hey, God watching over us and only permitting the pure to enter Heaven and disposing the heathens to Hell, is a canonical system that has worked for two Millennia.
The latest data shows that with 4% of the global population, the U.S. holds 20% of all occupying jails in the world.
The upcoming Trump trials will go a long way to build a case for TSAYD. Or not. The Supreme Court could still in time determine that he is not immune to being tried for a serious crime. If the Jack Smith and/or Fani Willis trial proceeds and convicts Donald Trump, and he is actually imprisoned for a long period, maybe our court system might well not be all that bad. But what confidence do you have that this happen? Under any circumstance, Three Strikes and You're Dead deserves a hearing.
Well, I guess I got carried away by my vision of this deprecatory past. The present actually, my life today, is antipodal to that extreme, and tends to focus on only having a good time and just watching the world evolve. Thus our around the world trip. I've given up taking an active role to save Planet Earth and Humanity. As the globe turns and we get close to completing our circumnavigation, return tomorrow for our adventures in New York City.
Oh, we did get to the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. Details later, but this is the view from our room.
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