Scared Straight

So, Laura and I have been watching this show, "Scared Straight" or something like that.  These little wannabe criminal kids get taken to a jail or a prison for a day and everyone yells at them and gets them to see that they want to be better so they don't end up in jail or prison.  The only problem is that these are modern kids.  Society has taken the bite out of justice, and they know it.  There are always two or three who laugh their way through the whole thing, because they know that there's nothing the guard or inmates can acutally DO to them.  And they're right. 
The Liberal will tell you that the problem is that we spend so much money on just "locking bad guys up and throwing away the key" instead of initiating programs where we educate young people before they have a chance to turn into bad apples.  I think this is a pretty flawed way to look at the problem though.  My daughter is 2 years old(stop me if you've heard this one).  When I tell her "Addison, don't pull the scrabble letters out and dump them on the floor", can you guess what she does???  You parents who aren't reading this are waaay ahead of me, I can tell.  She DUMPS THE SCRABBLE LETTERS ON THE FLOOR.  If people are basically good, and they want to do right, why does she do that at such a young age?  Different blog, different day.  My point is this: people are born bad.  We are born to test the limits of what we can get away with.  When you find a $100 dollar bill on the ground, you're never tempted to give it to the first homeless guy you see. 
When I deal with parents at work who's children are out of control, I tell them, "you know, if my dad ever caught me doing that, he woulda left me unconcious on the street and called the fire department to come get the body.....I would have prayed for the cops to find me before my dad did".  I don't know if that's true (it's not out of the realm of possibility), but it certainly felt true enough back then.  Tying this together looks like this to me.  When my daughter is misbehaving, I spank her butt HARD.  I want her to be three years old and think to herself "I don't know why daddy is saying no to this, but I enjoy the good feeling my butt has right now, and I don't want to trade that for finding out what will happen if I do what daddy told me not to do".  I will have plenty of time to explain to her why she can't go running across the street, why she shouldn't touch the blue flame-looking thing on the stovetop, why she can't get ice cream from that guy's windowless van, etc....  But until the time comes when she can understand, she needs to understand that ignoring "no" means pain will soon follow.  Obey, and there is no pain. 
The problem with these kids is that they're functioning at a level below my 2 year old.  Society needs to back off of this "every kid has a mental disorder", "love them straight", "explain it before they can understand it" mentality.  We already took the power away from police officers, we need to reverse this before it gets to be too late.  I've been spit on, right in the face at work.  If you would have spit at a cop in the 1960's, they would have folded you in half.  They would have inflicted so much pain on you that you would have forgotten half of it.  And the country WORKED.  The prison system was not overpopulated, which allowed us to not pour so much money into it, freeing some of those funds up for other things.  We need to go back to pain first, explaination later.  I don't know why my dad didn't have to use very much pain on me.  I got my share of spankings, and unless I'm forgetting some epic beatdowns (which is possible), that pain seemed to do it for me.  Maybe it just works THAT WELL.