Can you sense your own inability to realize that you are DELIBERATELY misreading and misconstruing other people’s opinions in bad faith to make yourself feel good about your own self-righteousness? 

Roger, intelligent, creative, compassionate people have worked on the issue of prisons for centuries, and have constantly come up against the "dark avenging underside", the Salem witch hunt side, the judge without facts side, the surround Carthage jail and shoot Joseph Smith through the windows at night, mob mentality of this country.  Today, prisons in America serve one principle:  money.  People pretend it’s about something else, but the number one "legitimate" "industry" in California is prisons.  In Sweden, there is a sane prison system.  It’s a model for the world.  Roman Polansky, for one thing, could make brilliant, inciteful films for young boys and men about why you don’t drug and date-rape women.  Since much of our culture is directed toward telling them such behavior is just fine, it would be good to do something to counteract that.  Ms. Bergen could act as a consultant and make sure they were useful to the end of engendering respect for women.  That is one possibility.  We would rather live in a make-believe world that SVU rides to the rescue, locks up the bad guys, and throws away the keys.  What doors those keys are for, we don’t want to think. 

 According to the New York Times, "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners."  There are 2.3 million Americans in prison; China, for comparision, has 1.6, with 4 times the population.  And, as Jessica Mitford pointed out in her landmark Kind and Usual Punishment, it costs the same to send a man to prison for a year and to Yale University, which to her suggested the possibility of exchange scholarships.

Even a simpleton could figure out that if you paid a person $30,000 not to be a thief, chances are you’d save money over the $50,000 it costs to keep them in prison, and in America, prison is where the criminal behavior is schooled and hardened.  If a kid goes into prison at 18, they will come out at 25 an angry, hardened criminal.  There are an estimated 300,000 rapes in prison per year, so care to guess how those people treat women on the street when they get out, people?  Good job, America.  Almost as good a job as we do leading the world in education….  what is it now, 22nd among the world’s industrialized nations?

It is a total failure of imagination that we can’t figure out what better use than sitting in a cage Roman Polansky could be to our culture.  

Again, that isn’t what was said, that isn’t what Ms. Bergen was saying, that isn’t what I was saying.

Yes, Phyllis, it’s like when children stick their fingers in their ears and scream because they don’t want to hear something.  Also having a mind with only one level and no complexity.  Sad, really.  Thanks for being you.  mp

Absolute bullcrap.  I should have followed Ms. Bergen’s lead and realized with the first idiotic remarks made about her post that there is simply no point in trying to talk seriously with someone who is as determined as you are to twist and distort what is being said.  I have worked at rape crisis centers.  I have worked in prison reform.  I have been raped.  And none of this changes the fact that the american prison system is an expensive ghastly completely ineffective joke. 

Cute. Dismiss my comments by pretending I don’t know what’s going on.  This is precisely the problem with this nutty "stand on your righteousness" way of pretending other people who disagree with you are out of it and therefore you don’t have to consider what they say.  Nice.

Oh, so you were there?

This post is beyond disgusting.  Ms. Bergen is asking a very intelligent question.  That is, in subtext, if a man whose girlfriend and unborn baby are slaughtered in an unbelievably haunting spree of mayhem and he soon thereafter (decades ago) commits a serious crime (which is undisputed, and for which no one has offered any support for his lapse whatsoever), what is the point of spending limited tax dollars, which might well better be used for education and treatment of children who are so totally abused as to grow up into Charles Manson, on incarcerating him.  What better could be done in this situation.  So, off you go, la de da, standing on your simplistic, moralistic soap box, spouting bumper stickers about anal sex.  It is this sort of inability to even look at difficult questions that has left this country leading the industrialized world in infant mortality, 23 or 24th in education, etc., etc.  Read my lips:  CANDICE BERGEN DID NOT SUPPORT RAPE OF A 13-YEAR OLD.  Is this hard to understand?  Yes?  Okay.  Let’s try it again.  CANDICE BERGEN DID NOT SUPPORT RAPE OF A 13-YEAR OLD.  When you grow up enough to figure out that life is, far from simple, a complex and difficult business, give us a call.  Then maybe you’ll be worth talking with.

This thread has adequately provided more than ample evidence of the "dark, avenging" underside of America.  It is embarrassing to see how totally unable to listen to what Ms. Bergen actually said and what she actually asked and respond to that.  What kind of a nitwit could possibly believe Candice Bergen (or me, for that matter) is in favor of child rape?  How blind, self-aborbed, and simply nuts do you have to be to miss her point? 

Ms. Bergen, I beg beg beg of you to take up your camera again.  What can I possibly do to encourage you in that respect????

While you are swaggering about patting yourself on the back for how very clever you are, True Grit, why don’t you look again at my posts and those of Ms. Bergen and admit at least to yourself that neither of us ever defended "raping a child."  It is a total moral copout to pretend that we did.  We were talking about something entirely different, i.e., appropriate sanctions for such behavior.  Since our prison system is a costly and abysmal failure on all counts, perhaps there’s something else that can be done?  But you don’t want to talk about that.  You want to argue and swagger.  So obviously you have nothing to contribute to an intelligent discussion of the original question Ms. Bergen posed.  Particularly since you can’t even seem to figure out what it was.  I was pissed because others also demonstrated amply their inability to look beyond their shallow, knee-jerk reactions to the name Roman Polansky to have a discussion about her questions, and attacked her personally, i.e., "go back to France," and such schoolyard nonsense.

By the way, Charles Manson is a good ole America boy, born in Ohio.  As were Richard Speck, Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh and any number of other serial killers.  Good ole American boys.  To date, France hasn’t managed to produce one of these.

Misreading my posts doesn’t change what I said.  Lin didn’t have a "very accurate post."  She attacked Ms. Bergen for asking some important questions.  Such as, do we believe in redemption (a cornerstone of Christianity).  We apparently do not.  Do we believe in compassion, another cornerstone of Christianity)?  No, simply no.  We make no attempt whatsoever to understand why a man whose girlfriend and unborn baby were viciously carved up would lose it.  I never said rape of a 13-year old is "hunky-dory," nor did Ms. Bergen.  What we said was callously misconstrued to mean that by people of ill-will toward us both, apparently.  Roman Polansky is not O.J. Simpson.  Apples and oranges.  But let’s throw them in there so it will be clear that Ms. Bergen is wrong in asking questions about the prison system, statute of limitations, fairness of the justice system, etc.  You don’t speak for the left.  The right wing talk show people and establishment decided to tell everyone what "liberal" meant and who is or is not a "liberal."  It is bullcrap.  As to you speaking for Americans?  Not on my watch.  You do a poor enough job of it speaking for yourself.

Mille grazie, Ms. Snooks. 

If anyone knew anything at all about history, and thought more than shallowly reacting to the name Roman Polansky, things would occur to them, as they have to Ms. Bergen, who was quite possibly one of the original targets of the Tate-LaBianca murders.  The lack of compassion for her position in this entire thread is so totally appalling!  Read about Charles Manson and what happened to these very real people in their homes in LA and what they have had to deal with in the ensuing years.  "Walk a mile in my shoes," I believe is the proper and appropriate way to read Ms. Bergen’s comments.