THAT’S THE LIFE: Inmates, including the killer band Concrete Death Puppy, live it up behind bars in the documentary “Let the Great Axe Fall.” (
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It wasn’t the comfy bed, yummy meals or color TV that made Professor Robert Blecker go positively postal. It was the Hershey bar.
He saw the offending morsel while visiting Connecticut’s laughable death row. Eyeing the cell where merciless murderer Steven Hayes, one of two depraved mutants who raped and burned to death three members of the Pettit family, lay sweetly napping, he saw mounds of junk food. And that dang Hershey bar.
“It appalled me!’’ Blecker ranted.
“That someone could go in and rape and murder a family and burn them alive, could end up on death row, take his afternoon nap, wake up and watch his color TV and suck on a Hershey bar!’’ He was getting warmed up.
“For me, that symbolized it all.’’
The killers are laughing at us, good people of America.
Forget about shivs, “Shawshank Redemption’’-style sadistic guards and hairy communal showers. Forget about punishment at all.
Today’s self-respecting torture killer would not be caught dead in the prison yard without his SPF-30 sunscreen and fitted softball uniform.
“They can have dental implants!’’ said Blecker, a New York Law School criminal-justice prof who often gets ignored and reviled by fuzzy-headed criminal-huggers.
“How many Americans can’t afford dental implants?’’
Blecker has written a book, “The Death of Punishment,’’ and produced a documentary, as well as an e-book, “Let the Great Axe Fall.”
Let’s see if they do any good.
The notion of punishment’s demise went viral earlier this year. Danny Robbie Hembree Jr., 50, the three-name convicted murderer of a 17-year-old girl and now on death row in North Carolina, stunned and sickened citizens everywhere when he wrote to his local paper, the Gaston Gazette:
“Is the public aware that I am a gentleman of leisure, watching color TV in the A.C., reading, taking naps at will, eating three well balanced hot meals a day?
“I’m housed in a building that connects to the new 55 million dollar hospital with round the clock free medical care 24/7.’’
The mocking missive ended with a dare — “Kill me if you can suckers. Ha! Ha! Ha!” He noted that this “gentleman” will likely live his leisurely lifestyle until he dies a comfortable and natural death.
From Sing Sing to San Quentin, they’re laughing at us. And still, punishment abolitionists (including a good number of university professors) are pushing for more prisoners’ rights and an even cushier time in the can.
Wardens say they’re nice to the worst offenders because it keeps them quiet and makes prison life easier. Which explains why many cons prefer being inside.
Some, of course, disagree.
“These prisons are absolutely horrific places to be,” American University Professor Jon Gould told “Nightline.” He advocates giving cons a freer ride.
But how can you reconcile the notion of “horrific” conditions with the well-stocked arts-and-crafts room on Tennessee’s death row?
And the three-murderer band, Concrete Death Puppy, rocking out in Tennessee?
But my blood pressure rose to the danger zone when I heard about the all-prisoner softball team in Nashville, complete with crisp uniforms. How many inner-city softball leagues can’t afford upscale duds?
Blecker advocates for the death penalty, though he wins and loses converts with his choice of capital punishment — he prefers the firing squad to the electric chair (too painless) or lethal injection (too medical).
He does have a great idea for today’s coddled, garden-variety rapists and murderers who get a nice ride while doing life: Feed them Nutraloaf.
It’s a tasteless but nutritious patty that fails to tickle a discerning inmate’s taste buds.
Until the day when (if) Hayes and his partner, Joshua Komisarjevsky, meet their makers, I don’t want to see prisoners getting a moment’s enjoyment.
It’s time we stopped hugging convicts. Worry instead about poor, uncomplaining working folks.
Where egos, she goes
Christie Brinkley and ex-hub Peter Cook can’t quit each other.
Cook is the porn-crazed cad who cheated on fair Christie with a cutie of 19. In the four years since their brutal divorce, the duo has hurled nasty e-mails and almost met in court over treatment of their kids, Jack, 17, and Sailor, 13.
After settling the epic Battle of the Hamptons this week, Christie, 58, wrote on Facebook that she’s found “peace and protection for my family from the various forms of abuse at the hands of a narcissist.”
Cook, 53, said his ex has the ego problem. “Christie may never understand or come to regret the bitterness she has left in people’s hearts, including our children’s.”
Might be time for this crazy pair to give marriage another try.
Bike nuts thick in the head
This city bans communal cheese at Sardi’s bar to save tipplers from germs and wants to dump Big Gulps to trim waistlines. Yet, bureaucrats believe they don’t need to require the 10,000 bicyclists soon to be dumped on city streets to wear helmets to save their brains.
Bike-bozo Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg, who pushed the bike-sharing program that begins next month, want to encourage casual cyclists by not forcing protective gear. But bike-safety researcher William Milczarski called riding helmet-free “insane,” because 97 percent of cyclists who died of head injuries in recent years wore no helmets.
Do you expect common sense from a mayor who has energy-guzzling air-conditioners on his SUVs so he’s guaranteed a cool ride? New York’s bike-sharing lunacy isn’t safe. For bipeds or riders.
Keep out of NYC, ‘Girls’
Who’d have thought Mayor Bloomberg was a fan of spoiled, white 20-something chicks who live off Mommy and Daddy while wallowing in unplanned pregnancies and STDs? That’s what he gets when he watches HBO’s demented new series, “Girls.”
The show features four useless gals who live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and obsess over guys. One is writing the great American novel. They barely work.
“We love the show for inspiring people to move to New York City and become the ‘voice of a genera-tion,’ ” said Hizzoner.
More slackers? That’s just what the city needs!
We were lucky to know Nora
Nora Ephron was a New York original who wrote and directed a rich trove of romantic, perpetually upbeat movies whose endings never made us sad. She even once wrote for The Post. But Nora never told her legions of fans that her own life was slipping away. Nora Ephron died Tuesday at 71, after suffering from leukemia.
May she rest in peace.