Different Slants

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© September 8, 2008

Not every story, especially a true story, begins with its narrator (hero?) lying in a pool of his own blood and ends up relatively happy, um, eventually.

Not exactly “Happily EVER After”…let’s just say, happy for at least that one weekend.

Because, in 1978, my having a happy time of any length, was a rare experience, indeed. But it inevitably led to my meeting the incredible, the-larger-than-life Giuseppe Rabinowitz, a bizarre character that neither you, nor I, will ever forget.

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The Incident

Part 1

In Fall, 1978, I was embroiled in a vicious competitive battle with a major Chicago magazine distribution company. It began in 1976 and would end in March of 1980. Even though they are gone now, even though their name is erased from their former buildings in Chicago, I will not name them. It hasn’t been long enough, yet, for me.

One of my good accounts, out of sixty, was located in the chic shopping Mall on Chicago’s North Side. I would deliver several heavy magazines bundles to that particular store twice each week.

The Mall required all deliveries be made in the back or west side of the building, through a slim alleyway with all the trucks backing up flush to a concrete docking area. There were no supervisory people there, just the bare dock, and frequently, I would back in my thirteen-ton truck, unload the store’s order onto my hand truck, deliver it and then return and drive away without ever seeing another person. But I would learn that the docking area was NOT unobserved. Soon.

One cool Autumn day, I was running late in heavy traffic. I quickly backed my big truck into the docking area, like I’d done over one hundred times, uneventfully, jumped out of my cab into the otherwise empty delivery area, lifted myself up onto the dock that was level with the back of the truck, unlocked the strong black iron lever that kept my truck’s overhead door secure, lifted up the door and immediately began separating the correct five bundles from the one hundred bundles squashed together in the back of my truck. I worked alone, almost always, and had to be fast and efficient to keep my accounts happy and not lose them.

I was 28, slender, athletic, pretty fit and very fast. Working sixteen hours a day was a good way to stay thin, but I don’t recommend it to anyone. Inside of my truck the overhead light was burned out, so I struggled to single out the right bundles by their account numbers. I had a computer print-out list with how many bundles there were for each account. My sturdy, aluminum, custom-designed, oversized hand truck was waiting on the dock to receive the bundles. I grabbed several bundles, two bigger ones in my stronger left hand, and one smaller bundle in my right one. I held the smaller bundle flat against my chest so I could lean my body a little to the right, to balance the dead weight of the two bigger bundles.

(Read on …)

A while back, I posted 5 things that could really help the country, with the full realization that none of them would ever get done by the current crop of statesmen underachievers vying to replace that frat-boy-meets-the Peter-Principle-to-the-Nth-power, Mr. G.W. Bush.

I promised the other 5, so here goes:

6. Penal Reform.
I’m sure everyone reading this has heard a joke along these lines: “well, he’s going to go the big house, where some large inmate named Bubba will think he’s real pretty” {everyone laughs, the implication being that the amorous attentions of Bubba are just desserts for whatever sins were committed — whether child molestation or getting a contempt of court order from some Family Law judge not impressed by that person’s bankruptcy being a reason for falling behind on some draconian payment decree}.

I hope I’m not the only one who doesn’t think this is funny.

If we as a society are going to smirk at and countenance the contributions of Bubba to the administration of Justice, then we should have the courage to be up front about it.

Judge: “I sentence you to 5 years in the state penitentiary, where, chances are, you will be savagely butt-raped repeatedly by some real bad-ass characters in there.”

No judge is going to say that, so why is our prison system in the kind of state where we just assume this is going to happen? What cowardliness that we would accept that outcome while not allowing the judge to say it? Isn’t the implicit acceptance of this status quo a horrible moral faux pas for the citizenry who by default allows this to happen?

I have no soft spot in my heart for nasty criminals at all. But this isn’t about them, it’s about us. A civilized society should exact punishment from its malcontents in a way that reflects the values of the civilized society, not the malcontents. So, what to do?

Our jails/prisons/penitentiaries should be bastions of labor supplying a service to the state. Yes, I actually like something like “Cool Hand Luke”, (given that in today’s ever present media eye spotlighting things, the sadism of the guards in that movie could never be repeated). Inmates should work off their “debt to society”. And with the focus on housing workers, rather than idle, brooding malcontents, measures could be taken to ensure that the Bubbas of this world would be denied opportunity for their sickening deeds.

Lest anyone think I have a bleeding heart for criminals, I think a prison run along my criteria would also have these characteristics:

* no TV, except for Discovery and the Science channel, and maybe some PBS

* no weight rooms (why make violent people stronger?)

* a well-thought out way of separating inmates from each other so that it would be diffcult to  contribute to the formation of or sustenance of factions or gangs. This shouldn’t be too hard: it could be as simple as the times of common contact with other inmates would be strictly regulated — no opportunity for the Aryan brotherhood to have time to connect with like minded inmates (or the Black gangs, or the Hispanic gangs).

I think service on the chain gang would go far in making certain this outcome. Nothing like an exhausting days work to put a damper on other activities.

While I’m at it: no death penalty. I say this not on moral grounds (I’d have no qualms at all about throwing the switch myself for most of these monsters ) but on practical grounds. We’ve made a complete mess of this punishment with our Byzantine system of rules and criteria (killing a cop is deserving of capital punishment but killing a hobo isn’t). Unless we as a society are willing to make capital punishment automatic for capital crimes (as defined in the 19th century) then we can’t administer it and pretend to be fair about it. There’s nothing inherently inferior about life without the possibility of parole.

Sentences generally  need to be lowered. But the time served needs to be harder (but safer — no Bubbas).  It’s obscene that 2 Border Patrol agents got 10+ years for shooting a drug trafficer in the butt. A two week suspension from work  and a letter of reprimand would have been more appropriate.

So in summary, my penal institution would look like this:

* inmates laboring their days, but with shorter sentences (for the most part).
* prison policy would guarantee the safety of inmates from Bubba, whatever that would take.
* sentences would be lighter than they are now, generally. I would not apply this to the child molesters and truly violent criminals who deserve life.

And of course (if your read any of my previous postings) half the prison population would go free, because these are the non-violent drug-related offenses that should not be the business of any government.

Well, I guess I have 4 more ideas for “things that will help improve the country” which I’m not going to get to today.  They are: infrastructure development, education reform, Immigration reform (talked about in previous posts), and voting rights rethought — a proposal for enfranchisement of the self-supporting and disenfranchisement of the non-self supporting.

Comments anyone?