Jesus never said it. In fact, it doesn't come from anywhere in the Bible. The closest quote is from King Solomon, who said "He who spares the rod hates his son." And who knows what he meant by that. The "rod" a shepherd carried was to protect his sheep from wolves, not to beat the crap out of them.

And if you assume that Solomon really was advocating beating your kids because that's what some crackpot preacher told you, then I believe you should consider that dear old Shlomo (doesn't sound so great in Hebrew, does it?) came from one of the most dysfunctional families in history.

Tragic to say, it's not an exception in America's own little police state. Before you read further, please get the whole story, courtesy of Huffington Post, by opening this link in a new window: http://huff.to/jbCiW0.

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Privatization sounds like a good idea, if you believe that a for-profit corporation can provide any service more efficiently than a government agency. In some instances it may be true, but across the board? It's a false and dangerous premise.

In Iraq we hired soldiers of fortune, aka Blackwater and others, to run POW prisons and perform other functions that historically fall to our own military. We actually paid them more than we pay our own warriors, and exempted them from the rules our own men and women in uniform must operate under.

The result? When prisoners, many of whom turned out to be guilty of nothing, were tortured and humiliated, our military personnel were punished but not the highly paid private operators who gave the orders. Continue...

For many years, Jon Burge, may his name be cursed, and other Chicago detectives under his command, tortured suspects to obtain false confessions. Some of their victims went to death row. One that I know of was only 16. One was forced to falsely confess that he had set a fire that killed his own wife and son.

After ruining the lives of hundreds of innocent people, destroying families, creating a pervasive fear of police in Chicago's black community, staining the reputation of a beautiful and remarkably livable city, Burge retired to Florida to enjoy his pension and his booze. Apparently one of the few things this psychopathic scumbag really cared about was his alcohol. Finally, after decades of dodges and delays, he came to trial, in a federal court.

Why did it take so long, and why wasn't he prosecuted under Illinois law, which he was sworn to uphold but trampled? Continue...

India had its untouchables. Europe had the Jews. Groups of people who were blatantly denied the rights enjoyed by most citizens of their native countries. And we Americans, who just know that we're as close to perfect as humans can get, had our n-word people.

You know the word. I hate it, and it digusts me when some black people throw it around for shock value, or for God-knows-what. Rhymes with "bigger." Continue...

It's good new that state governments are beginning to see that we can't continue to build more and bigger prisons. The average American household already spends around $500 per year to keep people behind bars.

For the short term, the alternative most often considered is directing juvenile offenders into rehabilitation-oriented programs for shorter periods of time, while keeping punishment as the primatry objective for older offenders. It's a step in the right direction, but let's hope it's only the beginning of a trend.

Rehabilitation has gotten a bad rap for decades now. Continue...

It's always awkward for me when a Jewish person whom I normally like and respect goes on a rant about the holiness of the English language and the supposed scourge of immigrants, especially the "undocumented."

I'm not going to load this with references and citations, because anyone honest and intelligent enough to even understand the question should be quite capable of getting the facts for himself.

We have a situation in Arizona now where American citizens may need to carry "papers" to avoid unceremonious arrest and imprisonment. Perhaps in the Maricopa County Concentration Camp, Continue...

No. Not because I don't think some people deserve it, but rather because it's neither effective as a deterrent nor cost efficient. We need to have many safeguards in place to avoid taking the life of an innocent person, but even if we were to cut the appeals process in half, it would still cost more to execute a person than to incarcerate him or her for life.

There are even more serious issues. Continue...

Most mainstream Americans favor equal rights between women and men, at least in theory. In practice, however, some long-standing prejudices still hold. For example, a promiscuous boy is likely to be considered a "stud," while an equally promiscuous girl risks being branded a "slut."

Legal process should always be above such knee-jerk biases. Yet in some instances a particular sex offense committed by a male may be treated as a horrendous crime, while the same offense committed by a female is considered only slightly worse than jaywalking.

For example, take some cases from a west Texas county. Continue...