Take The Reason Prisoner Part 18

"What will I say, General Mosby?" Bennington murmured. "Cue me in. You were always the best public relations officer either of us ever had."

"Jim, from anyone else--" Mosby started, stopped, grinned. "The trouble is, you're right.

"But this time we don't need any style, this time all we need is the truth.

"Tell them why the prison wasn't running right, how the riot happened and why you are where you are tonight, and what the prisons need to make them run better...."

Mosby stopped again, and this time was very slow in re-starting.

"When you get there, I don't know, Jim. What _are_ you going to tell them?"

_I wish I could be sure, Mossback._

_I know I can make that hot seat hotter by stating no one else knows either, because we've never decided what a prison is for ... society's protection, a place to put people like Clarens, where they won't affect the lives of normal folk? A deterrent, a threat, a place to point to as a warning not to break the law? Or, as Thornberry would have it, the first step to returning people to normal lives as functioning members of society again?_

_Dare I say that the only thing certain about prisons is that so far they haven't worked ... that stone walls, iron bars, conditioning and drugs that take the reason prisoner, none of these have kept men in ... that they would always try to escape as long as there was hope, hope of something better on the outside._

As Mosby stepped aside, Bennington considered the reverse of that last thought.

_Was there an answer here, to ask his fellow-countrymen to face the immediately, perhaps the forever, impossible, that the only way to keep a man from hoping and trying to get out, was to build a society where they never got in?_

Then Bennington remembered Clarens.

_No, let's face facts, that till man is superman, there will always be people like Clarens, people who will never be redeemed. People, who no matter how carefully caged or watched, will ever be a potential threat, if only to their keepers. By what weird accident they came to life, well, list that among other facts as yet unknown, and consider only the end result, that there were people whose only pleasure lay in perpetual destruction._

_Automatically, such people themselves must be destroyed._

He was only vaguely aware of the flash-bulbs popping as he walked to the chair behind Chief Scott's desk.

_That could be an answer, a new addition to the Decalogue, a new Commandment specific to the judge giving sentence to a man like Clarens, an injunction not to jail but to destroy. Simply phrased for the judge, thou shalt not commit!_

He seated himself and blinked a couple of times, adjusting to the glare.

_But, beginning with Thornberry, there would be many people who wouldn't agree, who would never accept such an amendment to the Sacred Ten, people who never seemed to see that phrase in their newspapers every time a child was a.s.saulted, "Police are questioning all known s.e.x offenders."_

Bennington looked thoughtfully around at the men ready to question him.

He, too, was ready, ready to tell them....

_... Some people are a d.a.m.n sight better off dead._