Lawn Order

This is not what you like to read in your online Patch.com:

Bosley Avenue, 700 block. 9:50 a.m., April 2. A Baltimore County Detention Center inmate walked away from the jail while cutting the grass. Police arrested Daniel Faiso on April 5, according to online court records. He has been charged with first-degree escape and is being held without bail at the detention center.

It's not for me to say, but why is an "in" mate allowed on the "out" side to cut the grass?

I'm not picking on the local turnkeys, but I guess my fellow lefties would say I take an illiberal stance on crime and punishment issues.  As an existentialist, I feel that people are responsible for their actions, and should pay the penalty of confinement on those rare occasions that people are actually sent to jail.

I read about jailhouse overcrowding and I can come up with an easy solution.  Remember as kids, when we would be sent to our rooms - with no TV, no books, no dinner in some cases?  Jail or prison should be at least that inconvenient, so let's take away the recreational facilities and put some more bunks in the rooms where the ping pong tables and weight lifting sets now crowd out the felons.  You could still have convicts cutting the grass, but with a 50-lb ball and chain dragging behind them and a beefy guard watching over them, escape opportunities would be drastically diminished.

Raise high the roofbeams, carpenters!  But let the prison population serve as laborers as the new modern fun-free prisons are built higher and higher.

And pretty soon, prison won't seem like such an appealing place to spend the next 5 to 10 years, and people will do whatever it takes to stay out of the Ironbar Hilton.

I remember talking to a guy once who was involved in counseling felons, and his position was that being mean to people during their unfortunate incarcerations just makes them dislike us so much that they come out and just don't know how to act.

So then, put them back in prison!