If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house � that builder shall be put to death.
If it destroys property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall rebuild the house which collapsed at his own expense.
King Hammurabi, Babylon 2200 BC
Within our great nation, 3,200 years after Hammurabi�s code, certain individuals are still forced to comply with the code, while others hide under the corrupted guise of civil liberties. Every day, airliners, contract managers, engineering firms, construction businesses, physicians and associated colleagues are brought to court by prosecutors with green eyes and the taste of compensation on their tongues. The main difference between the implementation of the code in modern society is that we have regressed to a point where we replace the value of life with money, so instead of paying for negligent manslaughter with the only corporeal equivalent, you can pay with your checkbook. We shall name this the modern code of Hammurabi.
In every engineering discipline, there is a great deal of uncertainty.
In the real world, complex engineering problems must be solved to get the happy consumer into the air, or into the building that they desire, or to get energy into their homes to keep them warm, run their computers and cook their food.
Complex problems must also be solved to find cures for pathologies. These problems often include a great deal of uncertainty, which is based on system input. When rare conditions are placed on an engineering system, failure could be imminent, whether you are talking about a jet airplane, a skyscraper or the human body.
In most cases, even uncommon destructive system inputs can be accounted for in design, if you want to develop a system that could never be built due to exorbitant costs. Therefore a great deal of work for engineers involves balancing cost and safety. Yet sometimes when engineers do everything within reasonable measures, they are still held accountable for unpredictable system failure.
In many courts of law, when the facts enter the courtroom everything becomes subjective, and it becomes a battle between the knowledgeable professional trying to explain probability engineering, the Bernoulli sequence and other principles to a jury, while the prosecutor attempts to discredit an individual in areas that he does not understand.
Still, there are many cases where negligence has caused great harm including the collapse of buildings and bridges, airplane crashes, automobile failure, failed prosthetics design (due to material processing flaws from a knee replacement, for example). Engineering failures, oversights from businesses and malpractice can kill customers or cripple them for life.
Righteously, these professionals must answer to the modern code of Hammurabi for such offenses.
Let us turn our attention to a group of professionals who deem themselves superior to doctors, engineers, and businessmen, exempting themselves from such accountability. The guilty professionals are namely lawyers, psychologists, and politicians.
On a crusade for �civil rights,� some of these professionals have decided that although research has shown that military-style boot-camp-prisons decreased recidivism of violent crime by over 70 percent it is more humane to implement social programs and parole.
The median sentences for murder and rape are 15 and eight years respectively in Nevada. Most of the criminals only serve 33 percent of their sentence. The median time served for these crimes are 5.5 and three years respectively.
Many criminals exit the system short of paying their debt to society by 66 percent.
Who are the generous gods that have the power to absolve such a debt? It is none other than the parole board and associated psychology consultants of course. Do you believe that recidivism for violent crime is a serious problem? If you don�t then perhaps you should review the facts. The Bureau of Justice showed that in 1997, criminals free on probation and parole commit 84,800 violent crimes every year, including 13,200 murders, 12,900 rapes and 49,500 robberies. Over three thousand of your innocent neighbors died on Sept. 11. Were you aware that in any given year, your system of justice employs psychologists and lawyers to decide the fate of the next 84,800 murder, rape and armed robbery victims? You and I are paying wages (through taxes) to professionals who are on a liberal crusade to reintegrate violent criminals instead of correcting and reprimanding them.
The victims pay the ultimate price, and the rest of society supports it with tax. The stench of injustice associated with our system of justice cannot be denied. The issue is not only that victims are mocked by violent criminals who only serve three to 5.5 years in prison, but that the psychologists and lawyers who are responsible for releasing them early are collaterally responsible for 84,800 murders, rapes and armed robberies every year.
By definition, the job of �corrections� is to correct criminal behavior. If the quest for reintegration is so important to the politicians, lawyers and psychologists, then they should be held accountable for the results of their work as much as any other professional.
Do you think that criminals are unpredictable? In many engineering systems there are over one million variables that can cause system failure in any given second! Why do engineers and doctors have a better tract record than the justice system?
Perhaps it is because they work hard and are held accountable for their work.
If the justice system is held accountable for the results of their decisions, then perhaps they will think twice before paroling a murderer or rapist after only 33 percent of their term is served.
Perhaps they will think twice before desiring �civil liberties� and reintegration, instead of the correction of behavior. I support the implementation of military-style prisons. If our armed forces can sustain such treatment, and research shows phenomenal success with them, you have to question why anyone would put the civil liberties of a criminal above the civil liberties of a victim, especially where violent crime is concerned.
It is no surprise that lawmakers are frequently exempt from accountability, because they are making the laws with loopholes. Malpractice must be extended to law, criminal psychology and politics. I�m not talking about semantics either; I�m talking about real accountability.
Some examples of professionals who should be added to the modern code of Hammurabi are: divorce lawyers, who are proved to bend or omit facts that contribute to a decision that hurts a family; criminal lawyers, who have unethically represented or prosecuted a criminal by omission and non-disclosure; psychologists, who are found to unethically represent criminals who are requesting amnesty for mental disorders, psychologists related to parole boards who are shown to use poor judgment in releasing a criminal and sociologists who falsify or create loaded statistics to bend policy change to their will.
Lawyers and psychologists should be held accountable to the victims of recidivism associated with criminals that they are responsible for prematurely unleashing. There is corruption and injustice abound, and the main cause is that accountability is hidden behind mandates for policy change and new methods instead of adhering to the time tested and effective virtue of responsibility that is applied to so many other professionals.