In President Bush’s State of the Union address yesterday, he mentioned his support for a rehabilitation program for convicts who will be released from prison in the coming year. As I understand it, the program will involve things like job placement assistance, half-way houses and vocational training so that the ex-cons will be able to find a job easier after their release. He claims that once they find good paying jobs, they will be less likely to commit more crimes.At first, like many other Americans probably did, I thought to myself, “hey this is a great idea. Once these criminals get some training they will get jobs, helping the economy, and will be less likely to get in trouble with the law again.” But then I thought “wait, why should we reward the criminals by giving them free job placement services, and free vocational training when other law abiding citizens have to struggle to find a job, and pay for the required education to get a job?”
It seems to me that if anyone is going to get government support for education or job placement, it should be the other way around, where the law abiding citizens get the assistance, and the criminals get nothing. Under the proposed plan, if someone is having trouble making ends meet with whatever federal aid they may be getting, it would almost make some sense to commit a petty crime, serve maybe 6 months to a year in jail, then receive free training and job placement while the taxpayers wind up footing the bill for something the criminals and law abiding citizens should be paying for anyways.
Personally, I don’t think that the government should be getting involved in this matter. People should not get rewarded for committing crimes, nor should law abiding citizens receive unearned money from the government, just because they can’t afford the training need to get a job.
No one ever said that life is easy, and that you deserve to get handouts from the government. I agree that some people are more privileged than others, but why should the more privileged be punished with higher taxes, just so that their money can foot the bill for someone else’s handout. Jails are supposed to rehabilitate their prisoners, not just offer them a place to live until their sentence is up. If the penitentiary system in this country was doing its job, we wouldn’t even have to consider this program for recently released prisoners.
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