Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Benefits of Increased Incarceration

CNN reports Library offenders could go to jail:

Keeping library books too long could soon land some readers in jail.

Frustrated librarians want the worst offenders to face criminal charges and up to 90 days behind bars.

"We want to go after some of the people who owe us a lot of money," said Frederick J. Paffhausen, the library's system director. "We want to set an example."

Paffhausen, who took over as director in October, is asking the Bay County Library Board for permission to seek arrest warrants for offenders who ignore repeated notices.

Now, I know that some of you would expect that I would think this sort of thing is overkill, and that it's foolish to criminalize more behavior and to make more things punishable by actualy time in jail. Au contraire, but I understand the nuance of the situation. This benefits society by:

Making some mousy librarian types feel like Johnny Law, with the power to put those who offend them in the big house.
Punishing those who don't add to the library's coffers through overdue fines with hard time.
Frightening people from actually borrowing books from libraries and perhaps reading them, however slowly; this will free up library resources to do the library's primary function in the 21st century: to be a publicly-funded Internet cafe that not many people use.
Helps balance the incarcerated population, as it's not going to be 18-24 year old black males that this law throws in the slam.
Freeing library resources from fiscal collections, allowing them to focus more on their primary activities: protesting the overweaning government when it makes requests on libraries or on funds it allocates to libraries.

This, of course, these only represent the beginning of the bonanza! There will undoubtedly be conferences and communiques that emphasize the efficacy of this solution which many librarian and library administration will have to attend on the taxpayer dime to wine, dine, and discuss the pogroms.

Also, libtarians, who represent the most impotent and looked-down upon of the academic mindset, will finally have a status-bearing power that professors don't. You can flunk or expel a student who cheats or plagiarizes, but you cannot sic the police on them with visions of the miscreants face down on cement and roughly cuffed, can you?

It's a win/win situation. If you're measuring by the librarian/statist standard.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:17 AM