Prison Time

I saw on the TV news that a mobster received two life terms plus five years. And I thought, “Only five years? After two life terms, he only has to serve five more years? I bet he can’t believe his good luck.” Of course, I don’t know whether the two life terms have to be served concurrently or consecutively. But as the mobster is 84 years old, it’s probably moot.

There was another man in the news recently who received one life term plus a thousand years. And I thought, “Which is worse: two life terms plus five years, or one life term plus a thousand years?” After thinking about it, I decided that the latter sentence is worse. Because people always say, “Life is short.” But a thousand years: that’s a millennium. Of course, just because a judge sentences you to a thousand years, it doesn’t mean you must actually spend a thousand years behind bars. I bet they would let you out after eight hundred years, and maybe after six hundred with good behavior. That assumes a mobster can be good for six hundred years straight.

And then a court observer made this observation: the mobster with two life sentences will spend the rest of his life in prison only because he’s 84. If he were a younger man – say, 25 – they’d have to let him out some day. This tells me that in the justice system, words have very different meanings than the words people use on the “outside”. It reminds me of dog years. The judge says, “I sentence you to fourteen years behind bars.” And the prisoner serves two years and is released.

Of course, there is also the possibility that time flows faster inside prisons. Perhaps the prisoner really does spend fourteen years in his cell, but on the outside only two years pass. For further clarification of this possibility, I point you to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3 episode 1, “Anne”. I’m sure the show is still running on one of the less prominent cable channels – Logo, maybe. (Or you might find it on one of those broadcast channels that has a number ending in something other than “.1” – like 6.3 or 12.2 or 101.404 – digital TV’s equivalent of the old UHF knob that had 80 channels and no click-stops; Kevin James once said that tuning in a UHF station was like cracking a safe. But I digress.)

Sorry, I have this stream-of-consciousness brain that just rambles on making connections and associations until it’s out of control and I no longer remember the topic I started with or why I wanted to write about it. I should probably be on some kind of medication. I’ll look into that.