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.