Should Prison Really Be the American Way? [BillMoyers.com]

This post originally appeared atTomDispatch.

You’ve heard of distracted driving? It causes quite a few auto accidents and it’s illegal in a majority of states.

Well, this year, a brave New Jersey state senator, a Democrat, took on the pernicious problem of distracted walking. Faced with the fact that some people can’t tear themselves away from their smartphones long enough to get across a street in safety, Pamela Lampitt of Camden, New Jersey,proposed a law making it a crime to cross a street while texting. Violators would face a fine, and repeat violators up to 15 days in jail. Similar measures, says The Washington Post, have been proposed (though not passed) in Arkansas, Nevada and New York. This May, abill on the subject made it out of committee in Hawaii.

That’s right. In several states around the country, one response to people being struck by cars in intersections is to consider preemptively sending some of those prospective accident victims to jail. This would be funny, if it weren’t emblematic of something larger. We are living in a country where the solution to just about any social problem is to create a law against it, and then punish those who break it.

[For more of this story, written by Rebecca Gordon, go to http://billmoyers.com/story/there-oughta-be-a-law/]

While I've recently been challenged by pedestrians standing at crosswalks, and playing Poke-mon--while trying to navigate my motorcycle in states which require ALL vehicles to Yield to Pedestrians in [painted] Crosswalks- and ascertaining whether someone is going to step off a sidewalk, into a crosswalk or not, I do not think "Criminalizing" such behavior is the only solution. In northern new england, pedestrians already possess certain rights, and we've managed to accommodate them. It's not a foolproof or accident proof system, but it works fairly well most of the time.

George Bernard Shaw is credited with the quote: "To Punish a man, You must Injure him; To Reform a man, You must Improve him; and men are not Improved by Injuries."

Perhaps we can 'reform' people through 'Restorative Justice'--such as Norwich University now suggests to its Criminal Justice major students, or 'modify their behavior', or .....

When the World Health Organization used a modified ACE screening tool, for its 2013 assessment of the world's healthiest children-the Netherlands was #1 in the survey, and the Netherlands closed EIGHT of their prisons in the past two years. Perhaps we can learn something from them, too.

Should Prison Really Be the American Way? [BillMoyers.com]

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