Another Short Piece on Criminal Justice – Then I Promise I’ll Go Back To Renewable Energy

I just came home from my regular Friday evening visit to our local wine bar, where I was speaking with a friend who’s about my age (which means we were both teenagers in the early 1970s). He told me that he recalled that drinking and driving wasn’t a huge deal at the time, and that, unless you had done something horrible, there was very little chance that you would be arrested and that your life would take a radical turn for the worse simply because you were behind the wheel with a blood alcohol content of 0.0800001%. I was thinking about that, and I wondered if we’ve made any improvements in terms of accidents, especially fatalities to other drivers and pedestrians, now that we have police cars (at least around here) cruising around from 9 PM onward, silently, lights off, manned by people who are just praying to find someone who’s even the tiniest bit over the legal blood alcohol limit.

The U.S. criminal justice system, especially when it comes to people who commit minor infractions, is many times harsher today than it was then. Why?

I didn’t really twig on this until recently, but I believe it’s summed up in a TV commercial that I saw the other day, encouraging young people to “find a career in the criminal justice industry.” Industry?  Up until that point, I had failed to notice the obvious: it is indeed an industry; it’s a profit-making machine, like selling soft drinks or automobiles.

I bring this up because of today’s biggest news in criminal justice, i.e., the man in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes for establishing a blog that encourages free communication and critical thinking about the Saudi government. As of reports today, the lashes are being delivered in public, 50 at a time, each Friday, for 20 weeks.

In many cases, prisoners who face the most extremely brutal and inhuman sentences like this literally do not survive. In other words, while I was drinking wine, the Saudi government, fabulous friend of the United States, had already begun to inflict a punishment that is likely to kill its victim by methodical torture for the crime of encouraging people to think and speak critically.

If that doesn’t turn your stomach as a human being I’m not sure what will.  Yet as an American, it’s even worse.

We don’t have a problem putting an embargo on Cuba and making its millions of people suffer for half a century because its rogue government of 1962 had Soviet missiles.  But we somehow can’t ask our buddies here to just stop it?  I was born here, I live here, but I’m deeply ashamed.  If you’re from my land, you should be too.