Allison’s Minor Felony

Allison’s Minor Felony

Stirrups really are loathsome things. Waiting on a table with your legs splayed open like a turkey waiting to be stuffed is embarrassing enough under ordinary medical circumstances. Being restrained to the table under court order is humiliation on an almost cosmic level.

They used to punish criminals in prisons but those days are over. Someone finally figured out that it made them tougher and was a badge of honor. So some genius decided to try the exact reverse: compulsory tenderness. Thugs and hooligans found themselves confined to oversized nurseries with motherly matrons (and one or two oversized daddies for behavior problems) where they were kept in a state of regression until they unlearned their aggressive ways.

At least, that was the idea. The success of the idea was as much a matter of pure humiliation as it was of behavior modification. Street toughs found the process so destructive to their sense of self and status that they would do anything to avoid it…even obey the law.

In time, the idea was expanded to non-violent lawbreakers until some form of regression was the expected sentence for convicted felons. This is howI found myself strapped into stirrups at the local correctional nursery. I had been caught embezzling and convicted.