T

here are probably just a few of us left today who can remember watching the long-running American television series, The Naked City. It was so long ago I don'€™t think it even made it into the color TV era.

The program'€™s format was simple. Each episode served to lay bare the city'€™s hidden and officially unacknowledged culture of crime and corruption. To use a modern-day expression, the program exposed the sordid underbelly beneath the city'€™s otherwise respectable façade.

In the manner of all things popular sliding finally into obscurity only to be reincarnated at some future opportune time, perhaps the idea can now be resurrected and a new series produced in Indonesia about Indonesia and the country'€™s obsession, rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, with the popular perception that the place is mired in corruption and rampant abuse of power, the latter being of course the embryo, albeit the very womb from which all manner of corruption is hatched.

There would be an almost endless supply of real life material for each episode of The Naked Country: 240 million episodes, for no-one is free from the taint of corruption, man, woman or child.

Potential checkbook waving backers and sponsors would be falling over each other to get behind the production of such a long-running program and to reap the endless benefits that being a part of it would bring.

The Naked Country would lay bare the long-established corrupt practices for all to see and perhaps shame those indulging in it into seeking to change their ways and channel their energies and questionable talents toward changing the country into what has the potential to be a beautiful and prosperous place for all, a fit and ready contender to proudly take its rightful place in the world community.

Not to mention the windfall that defamation lawyers would have, constantly working at keeping the program'€™s producers out of jail.

Where would we start with such a presentation? We would need a head banging first episode that would galvanize the public and set them talking, thus inciting more viewers to tune in to the following week'€™s episode, and from that point onward be totally hooked on the series.

Perhaps the Law and Human Rights Ministry would be a good place to begin. Few other professions or institutions have seen such a high toll of their members falling under scrutiny since the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) set up shop.

Take the parallel between the prison system and the correctional system. The one seems bent on exacting revenge on those transgressors in their care, while the other makes some attempt at correction, however meagerly successful it may be.

Surely rehabilitation should be the aim of all. Seeing that prisoners do not re-offend when released; training them to take their rightful place in society, equipping them with the skills that will give them the ability and the confidence to make their own way, armed with the necessary self respect to do all of the above that the current system seems to deny them.

Instead, the punishment system or the revenge system as some call it, works to inhibit the self-esteem that would allow former transgressors upon release to join their more fortunate peers and walk head high with them through the bear pit that is the cut and thrust of the world outside of incarceration.

There is everything to be gained from this, an election year, by the powers that be by upgrading this equipment and
being openly seen to do so, with similar action in other correctional facilities throughout the country, with prisoners
eligible to vote and their supporters and families on the outside having the ability to support those politicians who have the foresight to see the benefits of investing in the untapped talent that lies locked up and out of reach in the country'€™s prisons.

Ian Modjo
Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara