6/3/12, No. 41
@Jaxonpool _______
Prisons now! It’s my right to eat too many donuts and take a nap. That is what living in a free society allows me to do. Not like in a socialist country, where they tell you how many calories you’re consuming. Same with schools. The problem with them is they don’t do anything prison time wouldn’t fix. Why waste resources educating the young when we’re going to have to lock them up anyway? So, I have a modest proposal, my 257th: turn schools into prisons. Tomorrow. In the afternoon, when school’s out, just say, “Sorry, kids, you’re not going anywhere!”
Tim Turner in his May 31st (2012) letter to you laid the situation out beautifully. Turner accurately pointed out that, when it comes to educating the young, nothing does any good. Nothing works. It’s all hopeless. He states that our “public schools have become a quasi-full-employment program, not an educational enrichment zone.” And he presses the point home, asserting,
I will take the tangible cost-benefit ratio from prosecution and incarceration every day over feel-good but ‘never quite able to be measured’ enrichment programs prescribed for the public schools.
In other words, prison is the one governmental institution that shows tangible results, unlike all of the others, including public schools. Well said, Mr. Turner! Read Mr. Turner’s eloquence here: Prisons work better than social programs
Mr. Turner really is on the right track. He doesn’t cite any facts, statistics, or authorities. Which is good. Lack of evidence indicates how self-evident he believes his case to be. Besides, everyone knows liars can figure. Anyone can manipulate facts. Turner rightfully steers clear of them. He travels by his own lights. Powers himself on his own stream. After all, he possesses, as he himself asserts,
[w]isdom gleaned from 68 years of growing in knowledge and experience.
Indeed, this is where wisdom should come from, not from reading and inquiring. Reading and inquiring muddy certainty. Studying an issue makes you have second thoughts. I dread second thoughts. Don’t you? I believe you should always go with your first instinct. Go with the gut! With second thoughts, you have to start considering factors you hadn’t thought of before. Like, evidence. Conviction becomes less clear..
So, why bother, when you already know what you believe. Whenever I’m looking for what I think about an issue (like public schools and prisons), I just look inside my own head, scrounge around till I find what I’m looking for, then report my opinions to whoever will listen. Often I record them in a letter to you, the editor of the Times-Union. Admirably, this is what Mr. Turner has done.
A self-described wise man, Turner formulated his ideas about the world when Lyndon Johnson was president. He points out that Johnson’s War on Poverty failed:
It has been reported that since the initiation of the War on Poverty by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, Americans have spent trillions of dollars in a futile attempt to eradicate poverty. The result in poverty reduction is effectively zilch.
Imagine a world where Lyndon Johnson never stopped being president! This is the world Tim Turner occupies. Well, dear reader, you can stop imagining this world and start believing in it, because Turner’s world is really our world. Wake up! LBJ still reigns. Didn’t you know this?
Turner also moonlights as an accountant. He has done some serious figuring when it comes to how his tax money is spent:
[M]y tax dollars spent on the criminal justice system have an immediate and positive impact on my life here in Jacksonville. Criminals who could be committing crimes against me and my neighbors are in the slammer. That’s bang for the taxpayer buck!
Touché, liberal maggots! However, Mr. Turner fails to follow his own reasoning out to its natural end. If the best “bang for the taxpayer buck” comes from prisons, we should move all of our tax expenditure into that sector. Since Turner falls short of reaching his own logical conclusion, I will help him out by doing it for him. The conclusion should be obvious to anyone: public schools are just one more failed social program, so they should be converted into prisons.
Prisons work better than schools. Everyone knows it’s far cheaper to incarcerate an inmate than to educate a young person. And everyone knows young people are just going to grow up to turn to crime anyway. So, I say, let’s just cut out the middleman. Let’s head the kids off at the pass and lock them up now, while we’ve still got them corralled. And, above all, let’s not mix our metaphors!s
First thing Monday (tomorrow), while they’re sitting in their classrooms, unsuspecting that any plans are afoot, we should throw up the walls, erect the barricades, build the guard towers, and roll out the barbed wire. By the end of the day, when they want to go home, we tell them they aren’t going anywhere, not to soccer practice, not to dance practice, not back home to mom and dad, not back out on the street where they’re likely to commit crimes. Sure, give them a meal, but more importantly, assign them a cot to sleep on and a place to put it. Probably in the gym. There’s lots of room there. Our tax dollars paid for these gyms, which had been under-utilized. But now, finally, those gyms, and the dollars that paid for them will be used properly.
Here’s a video of how the Duval County Public Schools will look once this excellent plan is implemented: What an enormous improvement over social programs looks like in action
And when they all get out at the age of 18, you can bet on it that they will be “scared straight” and will never want to go back to prison again! When it comes to young people and spending tax dollars, you can never be too tough!
By writing this letter to you, I have elevated the level of public discourse. I have fulfilled my civic duty. So, if you don’t mind, may I be excused? Sharing my wisdom is tiring. Now I would like to go back to what I was doing before I became distracted by Tim Turner’s letter. What was I doing before I read it? I was eating donuts and planning to take a nap..
See you the next time I feel called upon to fulfill my civic duty.
Sincerely,
Lemule Blogiver
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@Jaxonpool 