Cheney Shoots a Texas Liberal

[Guest guest]

Molly Ivans

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060213_accident_hunting_cheney/

 

Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas—what’s

the fine for shooting a lawyer?—and so forth.

Dick-Cheney-shooting-Harry-Whittington is fraught, as

they say, with irony. It’s not as though the ground in

Texas is littered with liberal Republicans. I think

the vice president winged the only one we’ve got.

 

Not that I accuse Harry Whittington of being an actual

liberal—only by Texas Republican standards, and that

sets the bar about the height of a matchbook.

Nevertheless, Whittington is seriously civilized,

particularly on the issues of crime, punishment and

prisons. He served on both the Texas Board of

Corrections and on the bonding authority that builds

prisons. As he has often said, prisons do not curb

crime, they are hothouses for crime: “Prisons are to

crime what greenhouses are to plants.”

 

In the day, whenever there was an especially bad case

of new-ignoramus-in-the-legislature—a “lock ’em all up

and throw away the key” type—the senior members used

to send the prison-happy, tuff-on-crime neophyte to

see Harry Whittington, a Republican after all, for a

little basic education on the cost of prisons.

 

When Whittington was the chairman of Texas Public

Finance Authority, he had a devastating set of numbers

on the demand for more, more, more prison beds. As

Whittington was wont to point out, the only thing

prisons are good for is segregating violent people

from the rest of society, and most of them belong in

psychiatric hospitals to begin with. The severity of

sentences has no effect on crime.

 

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