It won’t be long until Dutch prisoners can order a wonderful, cool piña colada while a beautiful woman from Thailand is massaging their feet.
Way back when, people had this crazy idea: that going to prison should be a punishment. That way, convicted criminals had to actually suffer for their crimes. Hopefully, this treatment would result in them changing their ways, just to make sure they wouldn’t have to suffer this terrible treatment again.
Not anymore. We now live in the age of the enlightened, which means we’re trying to coddle serial rapists and killers to death.
That’s, at least, the case in the Netherlands, where the government has announced it intends to give prison inmates an iPad.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice explains:
We’ve been trying to let inmates do more for themselves for a while now. It’s increasingly more important in this day in age to be self-sufficient. That’s what we want to teach them, for instance by arranging their own visiting hours and ordering their own groceries.
That comes from the ministry led by a minister of the VVD-party, a party that pretends to be classically liberal and tough on crime. During the last elections, one of their slogans was “Punishment, for those who deserve punishment.” Apparently, that description doesn’t apply to convicted criminals.
Luckily, one of the unions in the Netherlands, the FNV, is criticizing the move. Somewhat:
[FNV-spokesman Frans] Carbo warns for the risks of giving tablet computers to prison inmates. “You’ve got to make sure that the software can’t be hacked. We can’t allow these criminals to use their iPads to further their criminal activities.”
Anyone willing to guess what these iPads will be used for when the prisoners get their hands on them?
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