American gangs are vastly better positioned to destroy their country than any Islamic terrorist network, however sophisticated, could ever hope to be.

Gangland is a television program that regularly airs on The History Channel. Each episode is an expose of some criminal organization or other, from such long-term staples of the American underbelly as the American Mafia, to the notorious Latin Kings, to the much lesser known Dead Man Inc., an outfit of white punks that is said to have originated in the Maryland prison system as an informal protective agency for white convicts severely outnumbered and routinely victimized by black and Hispanic prisoners.

Gangland is not unlike other species of media in the genre of crime in that it comes perilously close to romanticizing the dregs of humanity by providing them an opportunity to garner precisely the sort of attention for which they long while simultaneously reinforcing the grossly mistaken idea that "the tough guy" is the criminal who, in reality, lacks the strength, the courage, and the self-discipline to assert his individuality by abiding by the laws of exactly that association — the civil society — that exists to end the very "state of nature" to which he and his fellow thugs want to return us.

Still, shows like Gangland are not entirely devoid of virtue: they fascinate for the window they offer into the rot that is the American underworld while at the same time reminding Americans of the alarming extent to which crime infects their beloved country.

For whatever reasons, most right-leaning commentators seldom if ever mention this topic. They tirelessly proclaim the need for us to confront the great evil of "Islamo-Fascism," "Islamic extremism," or "Radical Islam" (all misnomers, by the way, for the enemy to which they refer is in reality Islamic Fundamentalism), but there is no demand on their part for the law-abiding to combat the enemy here at home, an enemy no less determined than his Islamic counterpart abroad to subvert the American way of life. Moreover, American gangs are vastly better positioned to destroy their country than any Islamic terrorist network, however sophisticated, could ever hope to be.

It is a stone cold truth, as many rightists contend, that with a person who is willing to detonate buses full of school children there can be no compromise. Yet it is just as true that compromise with a drug dealer or gang member who hesitates not to shoot at a rival in a congested residential neighborhood populated with children is equally unthinkable — or at least it should be. Countless cities throughout America are virtual war zones where law-abiding residents as a matter of course refuse to sit on their front porches, prevent their kids from leaving their homes after school, and eat their evening meals on their living room floors for fear of being struck by a stray bullet.

It is nothing less than a national disgrace, an outrage, really, that such a condition could have been permitted to emerge in the United States of America. That our prison population has quadrupled over the last few decades is proof that some measure of the sanity on the issue of crime and punishment that had been lost during the heady days of the 1960's has been restored. But the paradigm of "rehabilitation" that rose to dominance during that time has not lost its hegemony, for our prisoners are supplied access to a variety of goods that well exceed the necessaries of life and that have nothing at all to do with punishment.

At the very expense of the civil association whose existence he undermined, a convicted criminal in one of America's correctional facilities can avail himself, not just of an education, but a college education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels: people have left prison with law and doctoral degrees. Prisoners also have available to them movies to watch, sports to play, and, what is most preposterous, weights to lift.

All of this must be brought to an end.

If the reader is in search of an analysis of our current situation of the sort that one of our criminologists would be expected to supply, an analysis noted for both the extensiveness of its length as well as the specificity of its policy proposals, he must look beyond this article. It neither offers statistics nor cites experts. In addition to calling attention to what I take to be a problem that, in spite of being quite possibly this nation's greatest scourge, has indefensibly fallen into a state of neglect, my objective here is simply to supply readers with nothing more or less than an intimation of the direction in which our disposition toward criminality and criminals needs to shift.

A metaphorical genocide must be diligently, systematically, and mercilessly prosecuted against the gang culture that dominates America's prisons. This is simply to say that such prison gangs as there are need to be crushed by way of being coerced into disbanding, and authorities must insure that conditions are such that their reemergence is never again either a viable or appealing possibility. Gangs are the product of fear, weakness, and cowardice, but the mentality that they engender and embody dismantles those of their members' inhibitions that, as individuals, they would have otherwise had, restraints that, once overcome, render all but inevitable the cultivation of violently destructive dispositions. Gang members as gang members must be obliterated. Within the ashes and dust of their ruins a seed must be planted, a seed from which, we must hope, will grow a new sort of entity, something at least approximating a real man, a being with individuality, a being who can stand on his own two feet, so to speak.

All of the goods to which prisoners in America currently have access must be denied them. Prison must once again become among the most dreaded places imaginable, but not, as it currently stands, because of the routine, and routinely barbaric, victimization of prisoners at the hands of other prisoners; it must be dreadful because of the severe deprivation of amenities that prisoners will, as matter of course, suffer. As my late father once remarked, upon their release, former prisoners should be too weak to so much as mug an elderly woman. I must add, and too fearful to even think about it.

In every crime ridden neighborhood in the country, the police should be an uninterrupted presence, and if the police can't do it themselves, then each state's National Guard forces should pick up the slack. The National Guard is far more needed here at home than abroad. The law-abiding citizens, not just of the ghettoes and barrios that are the malignant tumors of the American body, but of every town, should see to it that they are armed with both the ability and weaponry to defend themselves against the vermin that would otherwise prey upon them. This may require them to engage in weightlifting or self-defense training. Restrictive gun laws, including laws that proscribe the carrying of concealed fire arms, deserve to be combated and ultimately repealed.

Capital punishment is a must. Remaining consistent with my objective, I will not here so much articulate an argument for the death penalty as much as state the uses to which it should be put.

Capital punishment should be administered both far more frequently as well as far more swiftly than it currently is. To paraphrase the great eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, all who are guilty of murder must, as a matter of justice, die. Yet it isn't just the murderer whom we must put to death; the rapist, the child molester, the torturer, and the excessively and habitually violent deserve to be executed also. Neither in the Biblical era nor for much of American history was capital punishment thought appropriate only for the crime of murder. That the crimes of rape, child molestation, torture, and aggravated assault inflict upon those of their victims who don't succumb to it a trauma with which they must spend the remainder of their lives doing battle, that such criminal actions, by imperiling the spirit of their victims, are, by design, life-denying, alone warrants ascribing to them capital standing. Another reason for doing so is the safety that will be restored to the law-abiding citizen, for the promise of death to all who would dare to commit any of these capital crimes couldn't but succeed in deterring no small number of would be offenders.

Finally, our attitude toward "the outlaw" must change, and change dramatically. Each of us must steadfastly refuse to endorse the tendency of our popular culture to characterize the criminal in just those terms that threaten to detract from or obscure the ugliness that makes him what he is — a distortion of a real man, a male from which the man has been extinguished. In place of terms like "underprivileged," "men of honor," "tough," "ruthless," and "fearless" to describe those who have neither the will nor the ability to contribute to civilization, we must substitute adjectives like "gutless," "unmanly," "trashy," "savage," and "weak."

Again, my objective here was not to make an argument as such but, rather, to provide some provisional, impressionistic prescriptions as to how we may proceed in encouraging what I take to be a fitting disposition toward crime.