Article by Ben Doolin on Dec. 13, 2015
History will look back at us with disgust… wondering how we could be so barbaric.
I am referring of course, to the inhumane, illogical and disgusting tradition of kidnapping, caging, raping, torturing and often murdering fellow humans on a grand scale. The tradition we call Prison.
The US has 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population. That puts into clear perspective that what we do particularly in the US is WAY out of proportion… before we even get to the fact that there is no logical support for prisons in the first place.
You might be thinking ‘this could never happen to me… I obey the law.’ However, the book 3 Felonies a Day exposes that the average American commits 3 felonies per day, most often completely unaware. There are so many laws and regulations on the books in the US that reading 200 words per minute, 8 hours a day… it would take 30,000 years to read them all. That is assuming they stopped creating new laws and regulations which are being spewed out at break neck speed. There is also the idea of comprehension as no one can agree what laws mean. The Supreme Court is very often split 5-4 (the best legal minds… reading the same laws) and recently decided that words do not mean what their common usage would imply. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse!
As for the legitimacy of this system… consider for a minute three people… Mr. Red, Mr. White and Mr. Blue. Mr. Red steals a dollar from Mr. White. Mr. Blue sees the crime, confronts Mr. Red and says “I saw you commit that crime… so, I’m going to take that dollar from you… and I’m going to take another dollar from you… as ‘punishment’… and I’m going to keep both”.
There is no logical reason for Mr. Blue (representing government) to be involved. His interaction is to violate Red and White for his own personal benefit.
To further their own self interest, politicians destroy the lives of offenders, often leaving them without the ability to get a job or find a house for having been labeled a ‘felon’.
This leaves ‘an honest life’ out of reach for very many… leaving them to pursue crime to stay alive. This class of ‘boogeymen’ are used by politicians that promise to ‘get tough on crime’. This cycle has resulted in three strikes laws and mandatory minimums which has pushed the US prison population to over 2.2 million… and has left a third of the nation with a criminal record.
What’s worse… is that 80% of the prison population violated no person or property. They committed no crime. They simply ‘offended the legislature’.
Beyond that… ‘the right to legislate’ is logically invalid. Can you personally… decide on some random rule… and enforce that rule with a death threat? If you tried, you’d be killed in your attempt to enforce it… and everyone would understand that you were in the wrong. That is because humans do not have that right. Since humans do not have that right… it can not be assigned to anyone else. There is no logical path for people to have ‘the right to legislate’.
All that is needed for social order… is an enforced civil system. When person or property has been violated, the victim should be able to make a claim for the damage done (no victim, no crime). The offender, if found to have been responsible for the violation should be compelled to make the victim (or the victim’s estate… if the victim died) whole, at which point the offender has ‘fixed what he broke’ and can continue his life (acknowledging that murder might result in an award so large that the offender spends the rest of his life working off that debt).
There is also no need for humans to enslave themselves to rulers (The State) for this ‘minor service’. Private dispute resolution already exists in the free market.
Showing again how The State… is both evil… and unnecessary.
