May 17, 2013
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If “going to jail for personal gain” is an art”and it’s about time that we finally recognize it as such”then Lopez has taken her craft and elevated it to unprecedented levels. Lopez’s predecessors have all been sloppy amateurs by comparison. She is a veritable virtuoso”the Eric Clapton of getting arrested for self-serving reasons.
For Ms. Lopez, prison is not so much a place of penance and punishment as it is a health spa with wardens. She will be spending 63 days in jail with the expectation that at the end of her redemptive sojourn, her tobacco habit will have been quashed. Whether or not she also expects the government to provide her with free foot rubs and restorative acupuncture goes unreported.
There is an obvious solution to the problem posed by inmates such as Lopez, one that would simultaneously improve international relations between Washington and Moscow while providing tangible benefits to the economies of both West and East.
We should outsource our prisons. If Etta Mae Lopez is so enthusiastic about going to jail, let’s send her to Russia. You don’t get a more authentic jail experience than going to Siberia. It will probably have more health benefits, too.
My logic is this: if Ms. Lopez is correct in assuming that prison’s hardships will have a beneficial impact on her overall health, we can also assume that there is a direct correlation between hardship and health benefits, and that more of the first will lead to more of the second. As Dostoyevsky writes, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.”
The West’s prisons are perhaps a tad too indulgent for a health-minded customer such as Lopez. As America’s prisons become stuffed to overflowing with sick people, it becomes apparent that new penal destinations are required. It’s not like you can send her to Canada, where several prisons” pampered inmates have access to enormous video-game libraries, including such appropriate titles as Pimp My Ride and Grand Theft Auto. And she certainly can’t be sent to the UK, where the prisons are so luxurious that a wife-stabbing inmate reported a couple of years back that “I’m currently doing a GCSE grade in maths which I am paid ten pound a week to achieve which I can spend on tobbacco [sic], chocolate and other luxury goods.” (Can’t let Lopez near that tobacco.)
But Russia”there lies the answer. Beneath the austere Siberian sun, Ms. Lopez could suffer righteously for her transgressions and be reborn at the end of it like a smoke-free butterfly emerging from a gulag cocoon. Siberia, rich in resources as she is, requires workers to extract her riches. And America, inundated with excess criminals, needs to undergo a penal trimming. In a time when relations between the US and the Kremlin seem to become more strained with each passing month, the outsourcing of prisons could be a remedy to those diplomatic tensions.
