Behind Bars that Don't Serve Beer

Like many of America's most profitable industries, prison has gotten a lot less fun over the years.  Despite what the movies may tell you, there is no smoking in prison.  A lot of criminals I know try to avoid jail because of that fact alone.  Three years away from the wife and kids?  Excellent.  No Marlboros?  Fuck that. 

It's the same thing with weight lifting.  Prisons haven't been allowed new workout equipment for more than a decade now.  And slowly, they are fazing out weight lifting in general.  Which kind of makes sense in the grand scheme of things.  I mean, no one wants the hardened badass to come out of jail psychologically twisted by the consolidation of his life and more capable of causing pain and suffering than when he went in.  Nevertheless, working out with milk jugs and broom sticks sucks ass.  Homemade weights have little to no stability and balance.  Total bummer. 

And guess what else: they make you work in prison.  That's right.  You may have spent the bulk of your employable years avoiding the hardships of drug tests, set hours and making other people rich, but all of that is over once you don the orange jumpsuit.  In prison, your overseers will assign you more work than your average Navy ensign.  Which really isn't all that much but still... work is for chumps. 

Also, as you probably already know, you can't fuck women in prison.  Which is a real shame for all involved.  I mean, most of the slutty danger seeking whores I've met would love the opportunity to pick and choose from a collection of hardened and horny men, but that opportunity simply is not there.  This hasn't really changed from the old days (neither has the work thing), but it's still worth mentioning.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Well, it turns out that we can expect a lot more oversight from the collective world rulers in our local jails.  Soon, they will be inserting microchips in prisoners so they can track them wherever they go.  Which will make escape a little bit trickier than usual.

The goal of all rulers is to have more power and more control than they had last week. This makes sense if you think about it.  The goal of anyone worth a damn is to have more of their goal than they had last week.  Salesmen want to earn more money than they did last week, athletes want better performances than they gave last week, prostitutes want... actually scratch that.  Whores are lazy.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, microchips. 

Old people and young people are already being fitted with microchip tracking devices so they won't wander off (GPS systems in cell phones for kids and tracking devices under the skin for alzheimer sufferers).  Most of these old people and all of these children have little to no rights, so they really can't argue.  And prisoners can't argue either.  That's what's so great about them.  If you tell them to do something and they don't do it, you are legally obligated to beat them and stuff them in a dark hole somewhere.  Which reminds me of my last girlfriend.  But I digress. 

After children, elderly and prisoners get used to being tracked, eventually it will be mandatory for the military (enlisted personnel first, then officers).  And then all government employees will have to comply.  And then, before you know what hit you (twenty or so years from now), you will be ordered to have a tracking unit on your person (or in your person) if you ever take out a loan (banks rule the world). 

Why am I telling you all this?   

Because you won't question it.  That's the problem with you.  As the United States government makes the brave new world even braver, you will utter stupid shit like, "Well, they can track me whenever I want and you should let them track you because if you're not doing anything wrong, why would you hide it from your elected officials?"

What you'll fail to realize though is that you're not being tracked to protect you from terrorism or to protect you from being kidnapped or escaping prison or whatever boogey men they throw at you as the reason for your new GPS toenail, they're tracking you for the same reason they won't let you walk through an airport with a knife or smoke in public places or use other-than-government-sanctioned currencies.  They're tracking you because controlling you lessens the threat to them.  If you have freedom, you have the freedom to change the world.  And they don't want that because they're in charge of it. 

After all, you wouldn't want someone coming in and telling you how to run your illegal sweatshop operations out of Laos, now would you?

Before I leave this paranoid chunk of rhetoric, let me point out something worth noting.  The American people as a collective have long urged for better health care, more guaranteed retirement income and work wages that rise with inflation.  The only employees in this country who are guaranteed all three are in the US senate and congress, members of which, incidentally, will never have microchips put in them.  They get a guaranteed pension for life, guaranteed health insurance for life and can give themselves raises whenever they want. 

So why should they give a damn if they turn the entire world into a jail?  It's not like that would affect their freedom.

Now would it?