The programs worked, in terms of rehabilitation: fewer participants returned to prison after their release than the general prison population. Therefore the program saved the state money, since it cost on (at that time) about $25,000 to keep him in prison each year. What Pataki and other opponents of the program focused on, however, was that it wasn't punishment.

In fact, programs in prisons have been looked upon as unnecessary frills by prison professionals for a long time, but the political atmosphere now favors their position. The reason is that crime has been used to scare people, to spread fear, and to cow them into giving up their rights, which is similar to what happened under Emperor Diocletian (284-305) when he established the totalitarian state that controlled (or tried to control) the Roman Empire until the fall of Rome in 476.

Crime, in other words, is another tool used by the people with power, to maintain their power over the rest of us. And it was so in the fifth century--except that more and more draconian punishments didn't work, then, to control or reduce lawbreaking: it kept on getting worse. The public punishments did work, however, in keeping people cowed, and today the extension of claimed Federal powers to detain people the executive defines as "illegal enemy combatants" may have the same kind of effect: keep your head down.

There was no revolution in the fifth century, just the takeover by the German military that has been labeled "the fall of Rome." This is despite the irrefutable fact that people were terribly oppressed; they were dying of starvation if they weren't killed in military skirmishes, or by their landlords (Senators) who had them flogged, or executed for the slightest infractions.