So Ontario’s opposition PCs want to spend millions bringing prison chain gangs to Canada.
You know where else they use the advanced criminal rehabilitation strategy of forced labour? China.
Wait, that makes it sound bad. Not all of China’s forced labour is backbreaking manual work. At night, some Chinese prisoners log-in for fun virtual labour. From Wednesday’s Guardian:
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
That’s not so bad. After a long day of breaking rocks into smaller rocks, or whatever, you get to play computer games. Fun!
So the problem won’t be whether Ontario Conservatives want to create prison labour camps like that bastion of human rights, China. The problem will be if the new system isn’t enough like China’s. Canadian prisoners deserve hours of computer game “work”, too!
Oh. Wait.
“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.
Never mind. I guess prison labour is still a bad idea.
