VOLPE SENTENCED IN LOUIMA CASE: NO RECTAL JAMMING TO BE ADMINISTERED

Now, we accept that Anglo-American jurisprudence embodies significant moral improvements over good old "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" thinking, but golly, wouldn't a stiffer sentence have been more effective in the Louima case?

Former police officer Justin Volpe just got thirty years for jamming a broken broomstick up Abner Louima's rectum in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct station house, in the now-famous, monstrously inappropriate and obviously racist assault on the Haitian immigrant during an investigation one night in August, 1997. Volpe, 27, could have gotten life. And though Judge Eugene H. Nickerson did a good job of balancing the sentence between the harshness demanded by Louima supporters and the leniency expected for a white former police officer, we propose considering another option entirely.

Instead of spending taxpayer money to house, clothe, and feed Volpe for the next thirty years (or twenty-five, if he stays in line), why not send him to some sort of court-created mental realignment facility, to receive a rectal jamming of his own, then spend a year or so talking about this experience every day with a nice counselor. Wouldn't that more effective-- not just for Volpe, who may or not use the opportunity to interrogate and overcome his own racism and rage, but for other NYPD officers, who would then understand that they were living in a kind of sci-fi world in which rectal jammings are administered by the authorities?