Criminal Elements

I was waiting for the train this morning, and there were these two delinquents waiting at the train station and griping across the tracks about their various overnight stays in jail. The girl on the north side said she was ROR'ed — either a Law and Order fan or familiar enough with our criminal justice system to know the lingo — five times while the guy on the south side, looking like the poor man's Fat Joe, said he would've been ROR'ed except that he had a warrant out on him in Piscataway. Poor him.

Now, this leads to a fundamental DUHHH question: why the hell would anybody come to Fanwood just to get arrested? I mean, there's nothing to do in Fanwood in the first place! The only nightclub in town burned to the ground... Are these losers scoring hits at the Dunkin' Donuts at 1:45 in the morning?

As the story goes on, the chick complained about the fifty dollar processing and handling fee the cops charge you when you get arrested, while our delinquent's "boy" came by, bailed him out, and offered him a blunt as soon as he got into the car. Here's a good sign you're addicted to drugs: when you can't wait to get out of the police station parking lot before you get stoned.

Now, the whole thing pisses me off.... Let's say you get arrested once. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you'll learn your lesson, you deserve a second chance. But these two assholes get arrested over and over and over again, and instead of going to prison, they're having a better time of it than I'm having following the law. It's endemic in our culture, and this is why I love watching drunk drivers get plowed over by big rigs on World's Wildest Police Videos and hate it when the police try to rescue the stop-sign-running jerk trapped in his car underneath a tractor trailer. Let the damn criminals be miserable, I say! Instead, we're all about "rehabilitation," which is only nice when it works, and even then in a limited capacity. Like in that toys-for-guns program they had a few years back, or the way people are getting billions of dollars for getting emphysema from smoking, or that Newsweek article six years ago where they sat in among the college admissions officers at Northeastern as they chose to admit a reformed juvie offender over an equally qualified law-abiding high school student. It's so freaking frustrating! How about, for once in our society, we reward people for not smoking, for not drinking, for not doing drugs, never owning a gun, not cheating on their spouse... in short, why don't we reward people for not fucking their lives up in the first place?