I've been thinking lately: jail sucks.

Given the choice between a death sentence and spending 60 years of my life in a concrete room, I'm not sure which would be worse.

But as a nation, we love putting people behind bars. Not only are our prisons constantly more and more overcrowded, but we throw people in the slammer for decades because they've stolen a few videotapes a few times.

It's actually true. With the "three strikes, you're out" policy, repeat offenders can get huge penalties for crimes we'd consider pretty insignificant.

Now, I'm no expert on crime or our judicial system. There are definitely some serious questions to deal with that I wouldn't call myself qualified to answer. I've never even actually been inside a jail. In fact, this column has nothing to do with jail whatsoever.

Jail is interesting only because it forces us to put a numerical value on the weight of a crime. But how do we weigh the smaller things we do in our everyday lives that go unpunished by our judicial system? Our common societal understanding is that you can lie, gossip and even engage in a few of those seven deadly sins like gluttony and sloth, but you'll never be close to as bad as a murderer. Those people are just inherently evil.

But maybe there isn't such a thing as a "small" sin. All of us have both helped and hurt people in ways we can't even imagine. So who are we to judge one another?

Here's an example: Let's say we have a really rich Aunt Sally. She loves food and lots of it, so she eats and eats and eats, beyond the course of moderation. For lunch, she drops $30 or $40 on an expensive meal. She throws lavish parties with rare foods that I would probably just consider weeds but for extremely rich people, they're key components of a salad. In any case, she inevitably finds herself overweight and starts dieting: Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, you name it, she's done it.

Now let's arbitrarily say she just spent $10,000 on food this year and another $5,000 to lose that extra 20 pounds (with a personal trainer and exclusive gym membership, that would easily add up), whereas she could have just spent $5,000 to eat moderately and stay in shape in the first place. That extra $10,000 could have saved a lot of children in Africa. Should she be responsible? Suddenly Aunt Sally's simple gluttony seems a lot more serious.

But let's give Aunt Sally a break and look at the country as a whole. Not only are we paying lots of money to be overweight, we also spend over $30 billion each year on diet plans to lose the weight we just paid for gaining. When you compare it to the $3 billion that our U.S. government pledged to battle AIDS next year (a third of which might get cut), suddenly we don't seem so nice either.

Of course, these are just extreme examples to make a point, and many diets are due to medical reasons, not gluttony. There is definitely a place for the judicial system, and I have a lot of respect for those who work to shape our courts and jails into a better unit of rehabilitation and dealing with crime.

It's worth considering, though, that each of our insignificant little actions has huge effects. That doesn't mean we should all feel guilty for existing; our good actions help people in innumerable ways we can't imagine either.

But for us to ever look down on anyone and call them a bad person seems wrong, considering the fact that we might be just as bad and not know it. When our religions tell us not to judge people, it's not just a nice, pretty thing to say. There are legitimate reasons; none of us are free from requiring forgiveness.

Except for those ladybugs on the Quad. They are so evil. But that's a different story.

Allen Eghrari is a senior in LAS. His columns appear Thursdays. He can be reached at opinions@dailyillini.com.