Sergeant Whitey Powers in Mystic River by Dennis Lehane,

…But, like, if they had an island just for baby-rapers and chicken hawks? Just airlift food in a few times a week, fill the water with mines. No one gets off. First-time offenders, f*ck you, you get life on the island. Sorry, fellas, just can’t risk you getting out and poisoning someone else. ‘Cause it’s a transmittable disease, you know? You get it ’cause someone did it to you. And you go and pass it on. Like leprosy. I figure we put ‘em all on this island, less chance they can pass it on. Each generation, we have fewer and fewer of them. A few hundred years, we turn the island into Club Med or something. Kids hear about these freaks the way they hear about ghosts now, as something we’ve, I dunno, evolved beyond.

I still remember overhearing a high school classmate (who Google says is now an econ prof.) say the same thing about people infected with HIV after a school assembly about HIV/AIDS. Forceable quarantine as a solution for all of society’s ills. It’s frightening that a teenager could have such a cruel thought.

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