It’s criminal not to do this.

When I walk through the subway station there are certain walls dripping with filth. When I drive by certain area, the ground is covered with litter. After it snows, the sidewalks are buried under slush for weeks. Currently, no one is willing to spend money to fix these things and I don’t see that changing. Why don’t we have incarcerated criminals help out. This won’t be like Shawshank Redemption where the prison workforce will take the jobs of others, all job must be certified by some board as having social value and don’t diminishing the demand for any other job. There would also be ground rules, such as no violent criminals and only criminals who have served 75% of their sentence (if you are almost done, you are less of a risk to try to escape). Of course I would rather a prison system that rehabilitated the inmates, but until that happens, the prisoners owe a debt to society. Wouldn’t society be better of if Martha Stewart shoveled snow from out in front of abandoned buildings, instead of sitting in some cell somewhere?

In unrelated news, I watched the movie Secret Window last night. Warning: I am going to spoil part of the ending. Please don’t read the rest if you want to watch the movie. There are two twists at the end of the movie and I wanted to bring attention to one them: The bad guy wins. This is a rarity in movies and something that I find compelling. What other movies are there in which the bad guy wins? There was Lawnmower Man, but than they had to make a sequel in which I assume Job loses (I refuse to watch the sequel).