Folsom Prison Blues

There's stupid lawsuits, and then there's lawsuits about prison conditions. Those take a big ol' fucking quantum leap past stupid.

Get a load of this shit:

--Five weeks after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in California's jampacked prison system, inmates went to court Monday to limit new admissions until the population declines.

In legal papers filed in Sacramento and San Francisco, lawyers for the convicts said only a population cap imposed by a federal court would remedy prison conditions that amount to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the symptoms revealing a prison system in distress, the lawyers said, are a "skyrocketing" number of inmates seeking treatment for mental disorders and an inmate suicide rate that is twice the national average, with 37 convicts taking their lives behind bars this year."--

Oh, boo fucking hoo. A bunch of convicts in the People's Republic Of California are going froot loopy and/or offing themselves. My heart mourns.

In reality, four out of five of these fine upstanding citizens will end up back in the clink. It's kinda like the dentists surveyed, except instead of sugarless gum, we're talking muggings, robberies, and assaults.

(Of course we know none of these poor misunderstood individuals are actually guilty. They're victims of racism and classism - over and over again. But humor me and pretend that they really ARE scumbags.)

And all liberal circle-jerking aside, it doesn't matter HOW nice we are to them. We can give them a library and a state-of-the-art gym and a free education and strawberry-kiwi scented lube to flog their dolphin with. And STILL they will end up back in prison.

So I say, fuck 'em. Put each of them in an 8' X 8' cell with a concrete bunk, turn the fire hose on them once a week to keep them clean, and shove their 1,500 calorie "nutrition loaf" through the bars of their cage every morning.

Cruel and unusual punishment? Tell that to Rajesh Bagtoo, who's still having nightmares about the fine evening when they knocked off his convenience store.

Here's some more sheer brilliance:

--"Court intervention is necessary because this state has simply been unable to take any meaningful action to resolve the prison overcrowding crisis," said Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, which filed one of the motions.

The Legislature's failure to act during a recent special session on prison crowding, Specter added, was final proof of government's refusal to address a teeming, violent system packed to twice its intended capacity.--

It's unbelieveable that this is happening in The Governator's state. Can't he just send the Evil Alt-Governator in with a big gun and reduce the prison population by half? (I find the phrase "big gun" highly arousing. I wonder what Freud would say about that.)

So in lieu of a lottery that marks the surplus prison population for death via Ahnold's alter ego's big gun, what do the bleeding hearts in their fuschia spanky-pants propose to do?

--Attorneys said that for now, they are not pushing for a court-ordered release of inmates to thin the population. Instead, they suggest diverting certain low-risk convicts, especially parole violators, away from prison and sanctioning them in the community.--

Oh, fucking brilliant. Reward the parole violators by unleashing them on the community. I'm sure Mr. Bagtoo will be glad to see that the guy who robbed him is getting a second crack at a second chance.

Just for shits and giggles, let's talk about what the legal beagles (no insult to beagles intended) mean by "low-risk." They're not going to let the drug addicts out, because of those idiotic mandatory sentencing laws. And that's perhaps for the best as long as drugs are illegal, since that makes them expensive, which leads to addicts committing other crimes to support their habit.

So what's the plan? To release the guy that robbed the 7 Eleven with a knife instead of a gun? Or maybe the guy who stole a purse but didn't knock the old lady down? Or the guy who stole a car but didn't wreck it?

Hey, I've got a better idea. Tell the lawyers to go fuck themselves. Lock the violent, anti-social assholes up in a place where they can't hurt anybody. If that means building more prisons, then fucking build more prisons.

And make sure you give the new prisons cool names like Folsom, so cool guys like Johnny Cash can write cool songs about them.