Posted: Jun 23, 2008, 11:30 AM CST
I have heard vague rumblings of a new compassion in an effort to lower government \"justice\" costs. The Governor of Arizona is considering stiff fines for driving under the influence of alcohol, instead of confinement, which leaves whole families without support. Make a \"criminal\" pay (Us) instead of the taxpayer. There is a novel idea. I\'ve heard a number of bureaucracies are looking at treating drug addicts instead of locking them away.
The Bible deals quite extensively with crime and punishment, but then, what would God know? Property crimes are punished by restitution and multiple restitution, depending on whether the loss interferes with the victim\'s livelihood. There is a silly idea, huh? The greatest growth industry in this great land of the free, is locking people away. Can it be that America only pays lip service to the whole idea of liberty? I believe so. It is too much like justice to really get a handle on the meaning of freedom.
Drugs! Not the 183 billion dollars\' worth on the government approved, monopoly supplied drug market, but the ones a once free people choose from a different list, the \"bad\" drugs. The great war on drugs, lost before it began, but continued to expand government power and control; is now responsible for about half of the nation\'s prison population, which is the largest in the world, I think I heard.
There is no doubt in a majority of American minds, that a person who uses any drug not yet approved by government, should have their lives destroyed by prison before the drugs can do much harm. They think the prohibition of drugs makes people safer, while the inflated costs make it necessary to rob them and burglarize their homes to feed extravagant addictions. What wise and merciful people! They were victims of twisted logic, long before the robbery. It is prison that has become the most powerful narcotic in America. We know if we build a hundred more, there will not be enough. How long before it becomes a crime in the land of the free, to publish what I\'m saying?
The past four generations have been told to go off to foreign lands and fight and die to keep America free. The people who tell us this, then build more prisons to keep all the free people. If we took our high school students to visit prisons and gave them a term paper assignment to come up with better punishments, we could begin to learn justice and transform the existing Just Us system.
Capital punishment. The Bible says you must have two witnesses to indict on a capital crime. We can assume the qualifiers of honorable, credible witnesses, not criminals with offers of reduced sentences for testimony. The two witness provision made it harder to indict. I\'m not sure that circumstantial evidence is acceptable as one witness either. The point is that under Bible law, you are more likely to free a capital criminal than to execute an innocent person. DNA testing has confirmed that we do it the other way round. Execute the innocent to be sure and punish the guilty.
President Bush has no problem with this. He was pleased to do it routinely as the Governor of the great, error free State of Texas. DNA has proven otherwise in Texas. Did President Bush ever apologize to the families of those he wrongfully executed? Does he have any clue how many innocent lives he has taken as Governor or President? Does he even care? We know now he is all American. He is probably the most appropriate representative of American society we ever had. \"Don\'t bother us with details. We have people to kill and prisons to build.\" No one should be surprised that we are the most despised nation on earth. We are worthy of hatred. Foreign policy is all about Just Us too.