Prison system is too cushy an alternative

It’s not every day that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a front-page story about somebody as disturbingly terrifying as Timothy McVeigh. In fact, I don’t see stories about people like him too often in most major newspapers around the nation.

But McVeigh seems to be the topic of choice lately with the new book “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing” and his execution coming up in May. Out of a vast amount of disturbing quotes from McVeigh in the Star-Telegram article, I found two that particularly made my blood begin to boil.

“I lay in bed all day and watch cable television. ...I don’t pay the electrical bill or the cable bill,” was McVeigh’s explanation of why he says prison is a pretty bearable place to live.

Since when was prison supposed to be a place of comfort?

I have heard numerous stories about inmates getting the same, if not more, luxuries than most people in this country who work to pay their bills, and although this has always enraged me, I thought it was either an exaggeration on my source’s part or something that was very rare.

To say the least, it makes me extremely ashamed of our prison system to know that people who commit multiple murders can sit back and watch “Oz” for free on HBO.

Whatever happened to that image of misery and punishment that we once associated with being sent to prison? I used to think that being sent to prison would be one of the worst experiences I could imagine. Now, the thought of not paying any bills and still getting to watch my own court trial on CNN seems like a pretty decent trade-off.

Making prisons less like hotels won’t take away the goal of rehabilitating inmates. It’s a pretty understandable concept that cable TV is not needed to help prisoners with their mental heath.

I do not claim to have all the answers to making our prisons more unbearable places to live, but I do know we should at least attempt to make them places that will instill some terror into the minds of future law-breakers.

The other part of the article that made me shudder was where McVeigh was quoted as calling his execution a “state-assisted suicide.”

The fact that McVeigh would think of his execution as something he would willingly inflict upon himself does not make me think that killing him is the worst punishment he could receive. In fact, it almost seems like we are doing him a favor in his mind.

I have always been very much opposed to the death penalty, and this is just another reason for me to think that capital punishment is not a good way to deal with criminals. Why can’t we take away all the luxuries, leave death row inmates in prison without parole, and thus eliminate a lot of these controversies?

Well, that is easier said than done, and I am the first person to admit that. But like I said before, I do not claim to have all the answers to our problems with the prison system. I do, however, think that if enough people wanted things to change, we could get on the ball and get things rolling. With all the intelligent people in this country, I don’t think it would be a stretch of the imagination to say that the prison system is reparable.

Emily E. Ward is a junior math and news/editorial journalism major from Springtown.
She can be reached at (e.e.ward@student.tcu.edu).

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