Death Wish

No, I'm not talking about the 45th installment of the Charles Bronson hit. The LA Times Magazine had an article this Sunday titled, "Dying on Our Dime." It's about the rising costs of keeping elderly inmates alive in prisons to serve out their life-terms. Ironically, or perhaps, not so ironically, a few pages later there is an excerpt from a book titled Undoing the New Deal; it's about the ideological basis of the new "economic crisis" facing Social Security.

How much more support do we need to finally institute a one strike and you're out law with a mandatory death penalty (let's say within 1.5 years of conviction to save costs on costly appeals that don't really amount to much)? That would kill (pun intended) so many birds with one stone. Oh and the 1.5 years should be spent in private prisons.