Last night I was watching a current affairs program on television (no, it wasn't Coronation Street), and they were discussing the sanity of the New Zealand governments recent choice to install under-floor heating in new prisons. In the debate the party supporting the installation frequently said "prison is not intended to punish criminals, but to rehabilitate them". And no one disagreed. Now quite apart from the fact that not even a half-brain soap opera hack writer would consider lack of under-floor heating as punishment, one has to ask the question - if prisoners aren't in jail for punishments sake, then why are they there at all? Well, didn't you hear us, the heating fellows will say It's so they can be rehabilitated! Ah, how benevolent, how nice, how civilised, how utterly stupid. It's all very touchy feely humanitarian but do the idiots who think up these schemes ever sit down and think it all through? Rhetorical question. If someone does something morally wrong you punish them. It's called "retribution" folks. Not vindictiveness or knee jerk reaction, but retributive justice. They cause pain and disruption, then they will be painfully disrupted. However, if someone is sick you rehabilitate them. The problem is that according to the worldview of our society there is no such thing as a moral wrong, and criminals are not evil or erring, but maladjusted and sick. It's psychological sickness of course, the only unusual symptoms being the criminal behaviour. How do they know that they are sick? Because they exhibit the symptoms. What symptoms are these exactly? Anything considered illegal or socially detrimental. That's the bit that worries me, quite frankly. Not the half-baked circular reasoning; that's fairly standard. It's the fact that a government may decide what qualifies a person as sick, and what procedures will cure them. A prisoner being punished has certain rights that may not be violated - and if they are violated, then the state is in the wrong. But any measures can be justified to 'cure a sick individual'. It can all be done for the greater good of the individual and society at large. If the government decides that dissenting from its policies is literally madness (it's been done before) then they will feel fully comfortable in purging that crippling madness from every 'sick' mind. If the government deems religion to be harmful to a modern society (it's being done now) then no one will have any grounds for complaint when they go to uttermost extremes to crush that 'disease'.
No one in high places realises this, of course. They're too dimwitted and/or lazy to follow ideas to their logical ends. At least . . . I hope so.
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