Murder in the First

Don’t be alarmed, I haven’t killed anyone.  I am talking about the Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon movie “Murder in the First” which came out in 1995.  If you haven’t seen it you should because it is a very good film about the cruelty of the prison system in the 1930’s.  Kevin Bacon’s character is put “in the hole” (solitary confinement) for 3 years and naturally goes a little crazy so when he comes out he stabs a guard to death.  In the film he is imprisoned for stealing $5.00 to feed his little sister. 

       I believe I have written about this before, how while watching the film I became so heated up with anger that my father turned off the movie to ask me what was wrong.  And my answer was

“The same people who have produced this movie to make us sympathetic with the character are the same ones who vote Reform. In fact the same people who are sympathetic to Henri walk out of the theatre and would still say if their car were broken into ‘Hang ‘em high, Harry’.  That’s what’s making me mad.  Hypocrites.”

       Reading the article on Wikipedia the author notes “the real Henri Young was no stranger to crime . . . “ and goes on to list his career which implies that he deserved to spend the 3 years in solitary confinement because he was a bank robber.  Dear me, he stole more than $5 so let’s put him in a black hole for 3 years; that’s really going to give justice to the nice fat bank manager.

       Earlier this week my mother started talking about the cost of a prisoner as heard on the news (which I’d already heard).  It costs $300 a day to keep a prisoner, apparently.  First of all, I find the math calculations ludicrous.  It’s similar to when they tell us it costs $150,000 a year to take care of a homeless person in Calgary – as my mother says, then why are they on the street? 

       The number one cure for eliminating crime is to reduce the poverty in a country.  That includes eliminating the vast gap in salaries.  Also yesterday I heard that the new Enmax chairman is going to be compensated by a million dollar salary, plus $500,000 in annual bonus, plus other benefits that make his annual salary close to 2 million dollars.  So my first question, how hard is his job that he should be compensated at that level on taxpayer dollars?  Let’s face it, the Enmax revenue is a given as we have a huge city that is running on Enmax power.  What does this chairman have to run that I couldn’t do on a mere $100,000 salary?  Oh that’s right, probably behind the scene shenanigans that we will never fully hear about because we wouldn’t want transparency in a taxpayer owned corporation, would we?

       A poor bank robber can go to jail on bread and water and live in a filthy hole for years but the crooks we have in our governments get to retire in the Cayman Islands drinking martinis on the white sandy beach.