Michael Vick has pleaded guilty and will soon be sentenced to prison. I hope he gets the full eighteen months that prosecutors are asking for. In fact, I personally would prefer he get longer than that in prison.
As a direct consequence of his guilty plea and sentencing, Michael Vick will lose millions of dollars, regardless of what decisions the NFL or the Atlanta Falcons make. Vick will lose at least two years during the prime of his athletic career, which is itself worth a small fortune. And no matter how good prison fitness facilities are, or how hard an athlete takes advantage of them, they are not even close to the level of the training facilities he won't be using at the Falcons camp or training room. He won't have coaches to work on his passing style. An athlete who spends much time in prison faces an inevitable erosion of skills; exhibit 1 is Mike Tyson, who was never again the feared and effective boxer he had been before his career took a detour through the clink after he was found guilty of raping a teenage beauty pageant contestant. Further, Vick will certainly not be asked to appear as a spokesman for Nike or others who have paid him lucrative commercial deals in the past; they'd probably sell more shoes if they hired Osama bin Laden as a spokesman than Michael Vick.
To which I'd say, GOOD. Michael Vick deserves to lose all the money he could have made if he hadn't thrown it all away on breeding, destroying and torturing animals.
However, despite how repelled I am at his crime, the decision by the NFL to suspend him indefinitely is WRONG. Commissioner Roger Goodell certainly has the right to suspend players for cause, but he has done so for periods of time. To suspend indefinitely a player implies that he won't be given an opportunity to earn a living through the league in the future.
My problem with this is twofold:
1. The criminal justice system was established for the purpose of affixing punishment. If we don't like the punishment affixed then it is incumbent on any of us to lobby for a change in the law (as in the case of Georgia law which was changed but is still being used as the basis for sentencing in the Genarlow Wilson case.) It is not up to any individual, institution or employer to usurp the justice system and decide how to hand it out.
2. We can progressively punish a person in many ways. But denying someone employment when they get out is stupid. If a felon gets out of prison (and most do, sooner or later) and wants to forsake crime and do something else, then isn't it stupid to force him (I use that word by intent because most felons are male) to go back into crime because it is the only thing he can make a living at? It's already hard enough for a felon to get a job. As I once wrote in a post entitled, The prison that follows prison,
For example, we say that convicted felons have the right to seek employment. However, we have for years cut the budgets for prison programs that seek to educate inmates about a trade (I have first hand knowledge of several educational institutions that suspended or ended their prison programs because of state or Federal budget cuts). We have also cut funding for job placement programs and halfway houses for prisoners. So, not surprisingly, when people who get out of a long term in prison with nothing to show on their resume other than a long stint in prison, have trouble getting a job, they often find that the easiest, and perhaps the only, way to earn a living wage, is through returning to a life of crime. This is called, 'recidivism.'
Now, I'm not going to stupidly sit here and say that if we funded more of these things, you wouldn't still have recidivism. Some people are habitual criminals and you could hand them a million dollars in cash and make them the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, and the next day they would still be out running a con, knocking over a liquor store or beating someone up or raping or killing someone. People like that need to be in prison, and there is little anyone can do to change that. But I am saying that regardless of the success rate (or failure rate) of rehabilitation programs, we as a society have an obligation to TRY. Because except for lifers or people on death row, the rest of the prison population will sooner or later be out among the rest of us, either rehabilitated or not.
It's a fact that Michael Vick knows how to make a lot of money if he doesn't play football. He knows there is plenty of it in dogfighting. Do we really want to force him back to it in order to pay the bills?
Michael Vick is s disgusing human being but it is not up to the NFL or anyone else to usurp the authority of the criminal justice system and hand out their own punishments.
Showing posts with label Michael Vick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Vick. Show all posts
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Marbury defends Vick, dogfighting.
New York Knicks guard Stephon Marbury defended Michael Vick and said today that he believes that dogfighting is a sport.
Well, I suppose that you can call anything a 'sport,' no matter how barbaric it is, even dwarf-tossing or Russian roulette.
If it's a sport, it's a sport that is illegal in all fifty states. There is a reason why it is. It's because in a civilized society we've come to a collective decision that people should look elsewhere for entertainment than in watching animals maul, cripple and kill one another for 'sport.'
Marbury tries to compare it to 'people who shoot deer.' But there are some big differences. Let's enumerate some of them:
1. The goal of a hunter is to kill a deer as quickly and efficiently as possible, minimizing the amount of suffering involved. In dogfighting, the goal is to produce death, but it is rarely quick or painless, and even the winning dog will sustain a a great deal of pain. In fact, if dog fights ended quickly, there wouldn't be as much money bet on them and they likely wouldn't be as popular. However, deer hunting isn't a 'sport' in which the agony is prolonged for the purpose of making money.
2. Most (though not all) deer hunters eat what they shoot. In this sense, deer hunting is no different than eating a steak that was killed in a slaughterhouse. As far as I know, Michael Vick never had a Pit Bull cutlet for dinner.
3. Thanks to the boneheaded predator policies of the nineteenth century, most areas where deer live no longer have enough (or any) large predators that eat deer. Therefore they multiply to the point where they are both a threat to the ecosystem at large and a threat to themselves and if the population were left unchecked they would eat their food supply and many would die of starvation. State game and fish departments monitor the deer population and use hunting as a tool to manage the deer population. It is also much more cost effective to sell hunting licenses to people who want to help them manage the deer population than it would be otherwise to have to pay professional hunters to do the same. It is true that there is also an overpopulation of dogs (many adoptable dogs are put in shelters and have to be euthanized because of lack of homes to place them in) but dogfighting aficionados actually contribute to the overpopulation of dogs as they breed many pit bulls and other varieties of dogs which because of their upbringing are unadoptible and either abandon them or have them seized by authorities. In fact, we saw an article just the other day in the Washington Post about how A North Carolina shelther will have to euthanize adoptable dogs because a judge has ordered them to use their space to house pit bulls seized in raids on dogfighting operations. Point made
Marbury is free to voice his opinion but it is a fact that societies can make laws which they believe are in the public interest, and this law has been enacted. There are certainly laws which have been enacted which I believe society should consider getting rid of (an example being federal laws against marijuana use) but I don't consider marijuana use to be a form of recreation because the law is very clear that it isn't.
If Marbury wants the law changed, then he should lobby to get it changed. Good luck with that, given the obvious contempt that most people have shown for what Vick did. But until then, anyone who is convicted of involvement in dogfighting will face the consequences of the law. As they should.
Well, I suppose that you can call anything a 'sport,' no matter how barbaric it is, even dwarf-tossing or Russian roulette.
If it's a sport, it's a sport that is illegal in all fifty states. There is a reason why it is. It's because in a civilized society we've come to a collective decision that people should look elsewhere for entertainment than in watching animals maul, cripple and kill one another for 'sport.'
Marbury tries to compare it to 'people who shoot deer.' But there are some big differences. Let's enumerate some of them:
1. The goal of a hunter is to kill a deer as quickly and efficiently as possible, minimizing the amount of suffering involved. In dogfighting, the goal is to produce death, but it is rarely quick or painless, and even the winning dog will sustain a a great deal of pain. In fact, if dog fights ended quickly, there wouldn't be as much money bet on them and they likely wouldn't be as popular. However, deer hunting isn't a 'sport' in which the agony is prolonged for the purpose of making money.
2. Most (though not all) deer hunters eat what they shoot. In this sense, deer hunting is no different than eating a steak that was killed in a slaughterhouse. As far as I know, Michael Vick never had a Pit Bull cutlet for dinner.
3. Thanks to the boneheaded predator policies of the nineteenth century, most areas where deer live no longer have enough (or any) large predators that eat deer. Therefore they multiply to the point where they are both a threat to the ecosystem at large and a threat to themselves and if the population were left unchecked they would eat their food supply and many would die of starvation. State game and fish departments monitor the deer population and use hunting as a tool to manage the deer population. It is also much more cost effective to sell hunting licenses to people who want to help them manage the deer population than it would be otherwise to have to pay professional hunters to do the same. It is true that there is also an overpopulation of dogs (many adoptable dogs are put in shelters and have to be euthanized because of lack of homes to place them in) but dogfighting aficionados actually contribute to the overpopulation of dogs as they breed many pit bulls and other varieties of dogs which because of their upbringing are unadoptible and either abandon them or have them seized by authorities. In fact, we saw an article just the other day in the Washington Post about how A North Carolina shelther will have to euthanize adoptable dogs because a judge has ordered them to use their space to house pit bulls seized in raids on dogfighting operations. Point made
Marbury is free to voice his opinion but it is a fact that societies can make laws which they believe are in the public interest, and this law has been enacted. There are certainly laws which have been enacted which I believe society should consider getting rid of (an example being federal laws against marijuana use) but I don't consider marijuana use to be a form of recreation because the law is very clear that it isn't.
If Marbury wants the law changed, then he should lobby to get it changed. Good luck with that, given the obvious contempt that most people have shown for what Vick did. But until then, anyone who is convicted of involvement in dogfighting will face the consequences of the law. As they should.
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