Bastards

So we got burglarized on Monday. They took my laptop, the backup hard drive, my camera and pretty much every single electronic device they could get there worthless hands on. By pure chance I had taken my mini flash drive to school with me and because my adviser wanted sample writing all of my college documents were on it. Had I lost that, I would have lost everything. My resume, grad school data, all my data on my thesis, I would have been irrevocably fucked. Also, by pure chance, there was a drive image backup of my laptop at my parents' house from late January. So instead of losing every song, game and photograph I ever owned in the past three years I only lost about 10 months worth. Now, I was considerably more emotional on Monday than I am today but some of my attitudes are still the same. I am not absolutely ruined as I had initially thought, so things are looking up, somewhat.
Also, while I was and still am thoroughly pissed about losing all my stuff, I regard the loss of the GameCube, all its games, my MP3 player etc. as inconveniences. I've never been particularly attached to material things, I suspect that's why I'm difficult to shop for. But the loss of my laptop and camera are much more than material things. I could not email, print nor even type up a paper due the next day. I lost all the photographs I had taken since the last drive image. As a student my life depends on access to a computer. Photography is my hobby, and without a camera or place to store my photos I'm deprived of something that brings me joy. They also took the tape recorder I was using to get interview for my final project in one of my anthro classes. More than material things, these were tools and storehouses of knowledge. They made off with about three grand worth of my stuff, you'd think they'd at least have the goddamn common courtesy to leave me my backup hard drive.
Which leads me to my next point. While I generally agree with the Swedes on economics and some social and legal points, I feel they're too forgiving. Granted, no system works in every environment and the Swedish system works pretty well for them, but rehabilitation does not work in the US. It can work in Sweden because they're culturally and economically more or less homogeneous and any aberrant behavior is just that, aberrant. It's uncharacteristic and as such can be trained out of them. In the US, there's such socioeconomic diversity and differences between subcultures that rehabilitation is impossible with anything short of brainwashing. You are the person you're going to be for the rest of your life by the time you're 18. After that, you can't correct a learned culture and outlook on life. Case in point is in Philippe Bourgois' book In Search of Respect where in one section he documents the attempts of crack dealers who grew up in East Harlem to enter the legal job market. Despite their best efforts they are incapable of adjusting to this different culture and occasionally in frustration steal from the company to get back at them. Bourgois notes that they were often victims of discrimination but most of the time it was their own damn fault that they couldn't keep a job.
What's my point? You can take the lion out of the jungle but you can't take the jungle out of the lion. You cannot rehabilitate a culture that happens to be incompatible with our own. (Then again, it's not like American prisons even try to rehabilitate prisoners so I may not be 100% correct.) So what's the solution? On Monday I would have said kill them. If you believe society functions like an organism then individuals who wish to maximize their success at the expense of others are essentially cancer cells. The body is full of single cells that all used to be individuals but all banded together for mutual benefit. Still, they used to be individuals and every so often they'll behave like individuals and act only in their own self interest. This happens all the time and its your body's job as a whole to destroy these cancerous elements, so it's not unlike a government trying to stamp out crime. But eventually the body cannot do this as well as it used to and cancer develops, hence why it's not normally a disease of the young. You could make a similar case with planned utopian communities that are seamless for a few years or even decades, but eventually the individualistic traits of the members emerge and the society decays.
Still, we're not cells and killing people for having a different culture, even if it is injurious to everyone and can never be unlearned, is inhumane. So my solution is this, send these prisoners overseas to developing nations. Make them dig trenches, harvest sugarcane, and other awful jobs people have to do over there. Give them good, nutritious meals, of course, I'm no Stalinist. The profits of their labor of course go to the locals who would have had to toil themselves for a meager wage. We won't have them do all the work for the locals, that would foster dependency, but give them a break. Let them regain their strength, accumulate wealth and live for more than work. Once you have a society which is healthy, wealthy and has time to spare, they can prosper. And there is little chance for survival for the prisoners should they escape; without medicine they'll succumb to malaria or other diseases, they can't blend into the society if they can't speak the language, if the locals have a hard time getting food, they'll have an even worse time. And these cultures are much less forgiving of murderous, thieving outsiders should they get caught...
So there you have my social plan to help developing nations, fix our overcrowded prison system in the US and make use of drains on society. And hell, maybe it'll rehabilitate the scumbags after all.