ALAN writes:

Apropos your post a “A Woman in a Man’s Job,” the murder of a woman “officer” in a state prison could not have happened in the 1950s because Americans were not stupid enough then to believe the ridiculous things they believe today. If they were alive, my father and uncles would marvel at the stupidity of people who think it fine and dandy for women to work as security guards, police officers, pilots, soldiers, sailors, bus drivers and train operators. 

Ideas have consequences, Professor Richard Weaver wrote in 1948. Unarmed women getting murdered because they agree to work as “officers” among hundreds of criminal brutes is one consequence of extremely bad ideas like feminism and egalitarianism. 

You offered no extended comment on that incident, probably because you thought the absurdity of the policies that made it possible is self-evident. And indeed it is – but only to traditionalists like us. 

May I call attention to what I believe is a fallacy in your first paragraph: The use of the words “corrections officer” and “corrections complex.” 

I suggest it is a very bad idea to accept the premises or vocabulary of our enemies or adversaries. We must choose the correct premises and vocabulary and defend them rigorously. A is A. A prison is a prison and should always be called that. Prisons are not there for the benefit of prisoners. They are there for the benefit of law-abiding citizens and the preservation of the civil order. 

Government has no right to “correct” anyone or to call its prisons “correctional centers.” Government has a right to punish lawbreakers. It has the right to enforce objective laws (not “flexible” law, “administrative law,” or “therapeutic law,” all of which are abominations). And it has a right to confine lawbreakers in buildings that are and should be called prisons. 

To accept the Orwellian redefinition of prisons as “correctional centers” is to permit government to act as Nanny. 

A parent may correct a child. A teacher may correct a student. An employer may correct an employee. But it is not the business of government to “correct” anyone. Government is not a do-gooder. It is a necessary evil. Its proper function is to enforce objective law, defend the Constitutional rights of citizens, and punish lawbreakers – not “correct” them or “treat” them. 

How many modern “conservatives” have made such distinctions? How many have yielded to the coalition of liberals and do-gooders who redefined prisons as “correctional centers”? Men like C.S. Lewis and Thomas Szasz warned about such tendencies decades ago. But most “conservatives” have learned nothing from their wisdom.

Traditionalists like us should always be wary of yielding to the vocabulary and premises chosen by our enemies. And be assured that those who would redefine prisons as “correctional centers” are among our worst enemies. We should oppose them and their unchecked lust to transform government into a Nanny State even more so than it is now. We should oppose them as uncompromisingly as we oppose feminism and egalitarianism.

Laura writes:

I did not offer extended comment on that incident for the reason you suggest. I thought it spoke for itself. To think that this stupidity directly led to the gruesome murder of a woman is also  too depressing for words. The way this story was reported in the press, focusing on the fact that the victim was alone in the chapel, rather than the even more outrageous fact that she was employed as a guard at all, was surreal, like something out of dystopian fiction.

You are 100 percent right. I should not have referred to Jayme Biehl as a “corrections officer.” She was a prison guard. The Monroe Correctional Complex is a prison. The murderer was not corrected.

                                                                                     — Comments —

Fitzgerald writes:

Words mean things and do in fact have consequences. I once had the great privilege of attending a conference where Msgr. William Smith former dean of Philosopy at Fordham University was speaking on this very subject. He had a very succinct and powerful syllogism to describe the use of language to engineer revolutionary societal change:

“Social engineering is always first preceded by linguistic engineering.”

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