Prisoner gets extra nine months for sharing cake: Cynical prosecutors put all of us in danger
‘Give and you will receive’, the Good book says - and nobody knows this better now than 21-year-old Timothy Caudill, who gave away a bit of cake and may now receive an extra nine months in jail:
A judge in southern Ohio must decide whether to send a man to prison for sharing a Little Debbie snack cake. The case involves 21-year-old Timothy Caudill, who last year was held in a residential community corrections program in Nelsonville for breaking into a bar.
While there, prosecutors said he bought the oatmeal creme pie from a vending machine and shared it with a fellow inmate who was on restriction and wasn’t allowed access to snacks. Prosecutors in Vinton County have asked Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Simmons to revoke Caudill’s probation and put him in prison for nine months.
To describe this case - and the prosecutors - as malevolently insane would hardly do justice to it. Prisons are meant to be correctional institutions but all too often they are used as a kind of Kafkaesque torture places, where sadistic underachievers and politically ambitious prosecutors seem to conspire to turn all the inmates into paranoid, resentful and dangerous serial offenders.
When you abuse the system and the law to such an extent that you slap an extra nine months onto a prison sentence, simply because someone gave a bit of cake to a fellow inmate, I can guarantee you one thing - and that is that the ‘offender’ in question will not interpret this as a fair use of power by the state. Neither will it be seen by anyone sane and good-willing as being a helpful part of a correctional process.
Reading these kinds of stories you can’t be surprised by how many of our prisoners are not reformed by the experience and become repeat offenders instead. The only surprising thing is that not many more of them become so embittered, enraged and damaged by the experience that they choose to opt out of society’s system and rules altogether.
This doesn’t mean we should change our prisons into holiday camps and replace the wardens with Oprah like do-gooders. A prison sentence should not be some kind of ‘time out’ zone for helpless parents who can’t cope with their spoiled brood - but it should be fair and it should leave the prisoners with some personal dignity and some real expectation that he or she can be part of our society again when a reasonable amount of time has been done. Treating prisoners like shit, treating them in a cruel and preposterously unfair way won’t help with this process at all.
Whenever a prosecutor manages to boost his ego and his political profile with these types of ‘extra time for sharing cake’ victories all he manages to do is to destroy whatever is left of the prisoner’s trust in society - and by doing so these prosecutors harm the future security of all citizens. By wilfully creating and supporting a system that only manages to turn people into repeat offenders they put the whole of society at risk, solely for their own narcissistic and political purposes.
End of sermon.
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