Give inmates raise, charge rent

The prisoners say they should not be treated as slaves. They certainly shouldn’t be. Slaves are good people who have been forced into slavery. Slaves deserve to be freed. Prisoners are incarcerated for their intentional crimes. Like anyone, they deserve our help in making amends or making a better life for themselves and bettering society, but they don’t deserve our sympathy or their freedom.

Before a prisoner can obtain parole he must be sorry for the harm he caused his victim. However there is another harm he has done to society, to the tune of about $100,000 annually that society must spend to keep him incarcerated. He should make amends not only to his victim but to society for his cost of incarceration. Of course he can’t do this on a few dollars a day.

I suggest therefore that he gets paid his market worth while in prison but that the money should go first to the cost of keeping him — ie food and lodging. The amount he paid off could then be considered in determining whether he should be allowed early parole.

This incentive would not only reduce society’s costs, but teach the prisoners the value of working hard and smart to obtain true freedom. many of whose behaviours make us cringe, and it is just as well we no longer venerate those people. We can remember their nasty deeds, and their good ones too, without the help of statues. The sooner we relegate them to that corner of history, the better. material to support students learning Canadian history? The market for this material is very small. Why can’t the ministries of education do a better job of paying publishers to create balanced story telling?

Erasing history for a political cause is one thing. What’s going on in the schools is erasing history due to lack of funding and published materials.