Suppose you have Pennsylvania Senator Greenleaf and a billion dollars in the same room, what happens? Greenleaf frantically spends the fortune to punish folks! Greenleaf likes to punish people. Greenleaf has a bizarre NEED to punish them. It's like some grotesque obsession.
The question is, are you willing to support his addiction with your bank account?
Certainly, Greenleaf is a clever politician; guileful, glib and gonzo, but he has a fanatic desire: punishment!
Along with his extremist cronies, Greenleaf is already bankrupting the taxpayers by spending a billion and a half tax dollars a year to punish "criminals." But, he's not content, not by a long shot. Out there on the political fringe, Greenleaf and a few of his dubious cohorts have cooked up yet another way to punish and to waste billions more tax dollars.
Greenleaf has concocted this scheme to forcibly "hospitalize" guys. For now he's focused on the elderly men he likes to call "sexual predators." Later on who knows what it will be.
The scheme would skirt the Constitution by pretending that it wasn't punishment and the men weren't in prison. He'll lie a little and call the punishment, "treatment." The prisons he'll call "hospitals," but nobody is fooled. And anybody could be next!
It's just a wonderful idea and what fool would speak up to aide the pervert "predators?" Perverts shouldn't have rights or be treated decently. For that matter, neither should Catholics, Democrats, speeders or arthritics. In fact, I'm probably the only person who deserves to have rights.
All the bigots just love Greenleaf's plot. There's only this one little problem: the grotesque cost! To lock up just one pervert for just one year will cost over $155,000. tax dollars. That's four times what it would cost to send the same old man to Harvard for a year.
The Greenleaf mob have gleefully projected that they can punish about 250 men a year with his scheme. None will ever be released. The intention is a concentration camp from which no one really graduates. Do you want to do the math or should I?
Lets be realistic and lets try to express the cost in terms that we can all understand. Nobody can really grapple with "millions" and "billions." We'll do it on the basis of each "average" taxpayer.
There are twelve million men, women and children in the Commonwealth. We'll pretend that each one is an "average" taxpayer and each one has to pay an equal share of the enormous expense of paying for Greenleaf's punishment obsession.
Okay, to start with Greenleaf wants a batch of fake "hospitals" which are really secure and oppressive like prisons. That costs about $30,000,000 or $2.50 for each of our "average" taxpayers. On top of that ante, for the first year, there are the first 250 old men at about $155,000 a piece. That's $38,807,812.50, or about $3.23 for the "average" taxpayer. So the first year's expense is $5.73. That's not so bad. What am I worried about?
Now for the second year. Pretend that there is no inflation and the cost next year won't go up a penny from this year. We realize that that's not true, but it makes the math easier. Okay, add another 250 old men to the concentration camp. Now there are 500 at about $155,000 a piece. The cost for year two is twice as much as for year one, say $6.47 for the "average" taxpayer. Starting to get the picture?
For year three the cost is $9.70 and for year 4 when there are 1000 old men in the system, the cost is $12.94 for each person in the state. The total amount that our "average" taxpayer had to spend during those four years to gratify Greenleaf's punishment lust is $34.84 and each year thereafter the sum balloons until the inmates start to die off.
In real life, the men who are intended to suffer Greenleaf's punishment are old fellows. The prison sentences for sexual offenses are ridiculously vindictive; out of all proportion to the actual harm done. The punishments don't fit the crime, they fit our anger and our revenge.
The average age of the men who will be the targets of Greenleaf's revenge is about 55 years of age. Lets figure that, on the average, each one will live to the normal life expectancy: 72. That's 17 years of punishment after the completion of their sentences at age 55. Of course, they'll languish in Greenleaf's phony "hospitals" during those years, so, the total, lifetime cost of punishment each "pervert" will be $2,638,931.25, over 2 1/2 million dollars! Each class of 250 will cost 660 million dollars or about $55 for each "average" taxpayer. Add that up for the class after class and the cost soon tops a million million dollars! But, you can afford it and Greenleaf NEEDS to punish people and can't you cater a little to his tremulous addiction?
Greenleaf wants to sell us the myth that this is a fortune well spent. To judge that, you have to figure out what your tax money is buying. So, lets look more closely at the old "perverts" who you'll be paying to warehouse in the concentration camps.
These are old men who have been convicted of some sexual offense. Lets start off by pretending that they are all really guilty of the offense. We know that they really aren't. Who can claim that he or she is "innocent?" (Can you claim to be completely "innocent?") But, "innocence" aside, we know that 1 out of every 7 men in prison isn't really guilty of the offense for which he is serving time. The number is even higher for sexual offenses. Fact it, lots of female accusers lie!
We won't trouble ourselves with the "innocent" men who are convicted sex offenders, society certainly doesn't care about them. Just say that instead of Greenleaf's vindictive "hospitalization" scheme the men are simply released into the community. Will they commit more crimes? Well, yes, occasionally some of them will offend again. The statistics seem to say that about 13% of ex-sex-offenders will commit some other offense sometime in their lives. What that really means is that if we simply release 250 ex-sex-offenders, 1 will commit another sex offense in any given year.
It's very hard to quantify the cost in dollars for an "average" sexual offense. Pretend that the "victim" were to sue for damages (a much wiser system) instead of imprisoning the "predator." What could she (it's almost always a female) reasonably expect to collect without all the rabid wailing revenge?
For indecent assault, she'd be lucky to get $1,000. For rape she might get $50,000 for her pain, suffering and "therapy." Let's be really liberal and pretend that, with all the costs of prosecution and injury to the victim and the society, the average sexual offense incurs a cost of $80,000. Really, it's about half that amount.
By keeping the 250 "predators" in the Greenleaf "hospital" for a year, we prevent a single sexual offense and, as a society, we save $80,000. To accomplish that, it cost us $38,807,812.50! That means we spent $485.10 to "save" a dollar. That's NOT tax money well spent!
But, I think Greenleaf's ideas are absurd and maybe I've distorted the figures, God knows, he distorts statistics in order to satisfy his personal lust for punishment. Say that I've minimized the social cost by half. Pretend that each sexual offense costs $120,000 instead of only $80,000. And pretend that twice as many ex-sex-offenders reoffend in a given year, no, better yet, lets say that every single one of them, all 250 commit another sexual offenses during the first year they are released.
The total social cost is 250 times $10,000 or $30,000,000. Boy, that's a LOT of money, but it's still more than 8 million dollars less than Greenleaf's "cure."
There is just no two ways about it. You can't skew the numbers to justify the Greenleaf cure. It's far far worse than the imagined problem.
Greenleaf's scheme is a kind of reborn hysterical McCarthyism. It feeds on unbridled imagination; unreasonable fear of a monstrous but imaginary demon. Greenleaf can sell his scheme because fear and suspicion are easy poisons to sell to the timid old women who are his constituents. The blue-haired ladies with money in the bank and fanciful spooks under the bed are easily frightened with horror stories and it's easy for them to be tricked by the politicians they trust.
The blue-haired ladies on Valium have prejudices and paranoias that are easy to excite. Greenleaf's fixation on punishment strikes a harmonious chord. The insecure seniors feel that it's better to be "safe" than sorry. Of course, in the real world no one can be completely "safe" and even the blue-haired Valium addicts must learn to cope.
Pennsylvania's aging paranoids also care about money. The old girls might not care a jot about the rights of some "sick" pervert, but they sure care about a buck. Now long, do you suppose, will they pay the enormous bill to satisfy Greenleaf's purulent passion for punishment?
In ten years the Greenleaf "hospitals" will imprison 2,500 old men and will have cost each individual "average" taxpayer $44,467.29! Are the blue-haired darlings in the medication line going to be willing to shell out that sort of change just to cater to a politician's unbalanced desire for punishment? Are you?
I urge you to write to your state senator. Tell him to get a grip! Tell him to take a reality check. Insist that he junk Greenleaf's scheme.
If a sex offender is so "disturbed" that he needs "treatment," he shouldn't be in prison in the first place. He should be in a real hospital, not in Greenleaf's concentration camp. If an imprisoned man is so "disturbed" that he's eligible for Greenleaf's punishment, he should get the treatment while he's in prison. It wouldn't cost pennies. Putting a man through 20 years of punishment followed by 17 years of phony "treatment simply makes no sense at all.
The truth is that there really isn't any "treatment" for sex offenders. Like the flu, the nasty tendency goes away on it's own over time. For almost all men, their unfortunate sexual weakness is long since "cured" by the time they are released from prison. Greenleaf's insane scheme is expensive nonsense. If you like it, you better have a huge bank account!
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