What many of you are essentially saying is that what really matters in life is our own self interest and screw everyone else. That there is basically no importance in assisting others or showing any kind of compassion to others. God forbid someone who has made a mistake be given any break. We are of course all perfect, and thus it would not be *fair* to the perfect among us to provide a leg up to those of us who are not.
The irony here is of course that saving $47K per year per rehabilitated inmate over the course of even a short 25 year working career is a savings to the tax payer of nearly 1.2 million - not counting the tax revenue gained from that former inmates earnings.
Americans seem to have an odd fixation on fairness when it's not fairness but rather equity that matters.
Let's extend your chosen point of view to other things involving bad judgement, mistakes, and or misfortune.
1) How about the guy who loves to ride his motor cycle without a helmet. Since he's an irresponsible ****ing moron more concerned with his own slightly enhanced enjoyment of his ride, than he is the social and taxpayer cost of a serious head injury - why should I pay for his uncovered/uninsured medical costs, TBI program, vocational rehabilitation and any long term assistive devices and accommodations. Screw him - he made a choice, he oughta live with it.
2) How about a diver who goes on a week long dive trip, stays up late, drinks like a fish, under hydrates, makes three dives a day, and then toward the end of the week gets an "unwarranted" hit (that we can pretty much agree probably is not totally "unwarranted"), or worse runs out fails to watch his/her SPG, runs out of gas and does a swimming ascent and again gets bent? Let's just agree the diver is a moron who made a mistake and is not deserving of care, since that costs you and me money, and besides we took the same trip, made the same dives and WE did not screw up and get bent, so why should we care about the diver who did?
The only difference between those views and your view on inmates are in minor details of circumstance and degree of obviousness. If you want to end rehabilitation programs or apply an absurd concept of "fairness", that's fine, but recognize it for what it is, apply it *fairly* across all domains and recognize that you are at heart no better than the inmates you want to punish.
---------- Post Merged at 08:59 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 08:06 AM ----------
This quote perhaps says it a lot more eloquently than I do:
"Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision.
"
up the first time around.
