Allow me to set up the following hypothetical situation: I am stealing thousands of dollars. What should happen to me? Some would contend that I should be incarcerated, but I’m not so sure. I mean, we have always punished people who steal, but that may not be the optimal course of action. To settle this question once and for all, I decided to apply standard incarceration calculus to this situation. According to standard incarceration calculus, if something is hard to do, like open-heart surgery, the practitioner should be paid. On the other hand, if something is too easy to do, like murder, the practitioner should be jailed. If you failed to follow that logic, do not worry; it just means that you haven’t read enough Kant.
Reliable data on applications of standard incarceration calculus is surprisingly difficult to come by. It was as if thieves didn’t keep records at all. And I don’t even want to get into the shoddy bookkeeping practices of murderers. It quickly became obvious that I needed to conduct my own stealing research.
For my first heist, I headed over to Tower Records. Unbeknownst to me, they were in the midst of their annual “stock-up sale” and I was surrounded by reasonably priced selections. Then I realized that the prices were so low, I was practically stealing from Tower merely by taking advantage of this monumental sales event. After paying the cashier, I walked out with 20 new CDs and some hard evidence for my study. Stealing was pretty easy, perhaps a little too easy. At this point, it looked like thieves should go to jail.
Wanting to ensure that the easy success of my first caper was not a fluke, I decided to try and steal something else. This time, with a gun. Unfortunately, there is some sort of waiting period for purchasing a handgun. After explaining the pressures of my column deadline to Winthrop Vanderbilt, the proprietor of the Cambridge Shooting Shoppe, he suggested that I consider using illegal fireworks instead of guns. It wasn’t ideal, but I bought $700 worth.
I strapped 20 pounds of the fireworks to my chest, waltzed into The Wrap and insisted that everyone give me their money or I would blow the entire place up. Nobody moved. Then they started moving again. Some of them were even moving towards me. Then I was outside, on the ground, with six separate fists of fury raining blows upon my person. This marked the last time I would take stealing advice from Winthrop. More importantly, I had made an important discovery: stealing money is hard. Sure, I had no problem stealing things (CDs), but stealing money appears to require finely tuned skills (or maybe guns). Perhaps we should be paying people to steal money instead of sending them to jail.
Why do we send them to jail, anyway? In an effort to learn more about the United States prison system, I decided to pay a visit to renowned prison reform advocate Daniel Mintz. Mintz brought up a number of good points and was very critical of what he referred to as the “prison-industrial complex.” Also, I stole so much shit from this guy. TV, DVD player, microwave, two alarm clock-radios. You name it, I stole it. His kids? I put them up for adoption. I stole his car, too.
As I raced down the strip in Mintz’s car, I came to the realization that I was invincible. I could not wait to find a crowd of adolescents so I could offer them drugs. Suddenly I was at a stoplight and a brand new Ford Taurus pulled up next to me. Sure, I was already driving a Taurus, but, like, the other one had a CD player. I leapt out of my car and began forcing the driver out of the other Taurus. “This is a carjacking!” I yelled. “What are you doing?” came the quick reply. Shit! It was a police Taurus! “I’m taking you to jail!” the driver said. And that was all it took. I was in jail.
I looked at the people around me and smiled. There were petty embezzlers and drug addicts, people who had made mistakes but lacked the depravity—the innate threat to society—that I had so successfully cultivated in the last 12 hours. I looked around and smiled and they looked upon me with awe, because deep down they all knew it. I was the only one who really deserved to be there.
