It will be bad enough if convicted murderers and rapists are set free upon us. Yet imagine the horror of releasing scores of crazed marijuana addicts, insolent pan-handlers, homeless schizophrenics, lewd prostitutes, and generally disreputable people into our midst! Morality itself will come under attack, respectability will be a sham. Only wholesale anarchy will prevail. In other words, as W.B. Yeats so nicely puts it : The blood-dimmed tide is loosed!
The editor of Ferment Magazine has applied his notorious energies to this problem and thinks that he may have found a solution. It has been common knowledge for centuries that Solitary Confinement is an exploitable economic resource. To my knowledge, no one else has, to date, had the idea of putting the exploitation this resource on a firm economic footing.
Take anyone whose intelligence that is above average, even moderately so, put him in a solitary cell for a long period of time. It turns out that he will do anything to keep from going crazy. For an intelligent being this involves figuring out some way to keep his mind active, and it is a matter of historical record that many great inventions, scientific discoveries, business ventures and works of literature have come out of such enforced solitude.
One finds many instances of person locked up in solitary cells during the Second World War who were able to preserve their sanity by working up, then memorizing translations of their favorite books. Trachtenberg developed his methods for rapid arithmetic in such prisons. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in solitary. Mozart learned how to compose by being locked up in a room by his teachers, who let him know that he wouldn't be released until he'd composed a fugue. The same story is told of Toscanini. In the film Chess Novel (Curt Jurgens, 1960) based on a story by Stefan Zweig, the protagonist becomes a chess master in solitary confinement, through strenuous practice at visualizing games in his head.
History supplies abundant evidence to the fact that intelligent, inventive convicts confined for months in solitary can be thus inspired to develop incredible ideas. Under proper management these can, and do, generate impressive financial rewards. It is only just and proper that our nation's prisons should benefit from the spin-off associated with this universally employed methodology of discipline and punishment.
The best way to start is for the appropriate administrative organs to send out memos to all penal institutions instructing them to put every prisoner with an I.Q. above a certain value, say 100, in a solitary cell. The I.Q. is far from being an reliable indicator of intelligence, let alone creativity, so if prison wardens are aware of any creative, clever persons in their keep who happen to have a substandard I.Q. they should also be locked up in the same way.
After waiting a month or so, these prisoners will be supplied with pencils and legal-sized steno pads. One should expect that the steno pads will fill up rapidly, and prisons are advised to put in a great supply of them. On a case by case basis, the prison may supply books, typewriters, even secretaries and computer services to some of the more brilliant and motivated inmates.
When the passage of another month, (or whenever the piles of filled steno tablets begin to rise towards the ceiling) , the prison can start sending patent lawyers into the solitary cells. In return for small but important privileges, such as candy and cigarettes from the canteen, limited periods of conversation with other inmates or exercise in the prison gymnasium, it will be the job of the lawyers to coax the inmates, by subtle or not so subtle methods of persuasion, to turn their ideas, verbally or in written form, over to them.
Once the transfer of intellectual property has been obtained, the lawyers can then pass it along to the prison authorities for further research and development, and ultimate patent protection for the prison and its administrative staff.
The moral issues are not at all complicated. Prisons have every right to rip off any and all profitable schemes, for their own enrichment. In the first place their inmates are all receiving room and board, that is to say, the equivalent of a research grant from a foundation or corporation. In addition they are also receiving free moral rehabilitation out of the pocketbooks of honest tax-payers. Given the fees charged by the psychiatric profession in our own day, this spiritual benefit is equivalent to many hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars per inmate.
Prison-based R&D has yet to be tried. There is always a risk that a certain small percentage of inmates being shut up alone for years at a stretch may go totally mad and need to be evacuated to a Forensic Institute for the criminally insane. This is not unknown in the history of genius, and merely needs to be factored into the general equation: look at John Nash; Robert Schumann; Georg Cantor; Vincent van Gogh. The list goes on and on.
As presented in this brief editorial this proposal is somewhat crude, It needs work, that's for sure, and further refinement. Hopefully there readers of FermentMagazine.Org out there who will be able to help me to put together enough money from governmental and private funding agencies to enable me to put aside a year or so on working out the details.