Via Doug Berman, there’s a columnist for the Peoria Journal Star named Phil Luciano who has come up with a provocative approach to sentencing everyone’s favorite hair mishap, Rod  Blagojevich.

How would you like to see Rod Blagojevich punished?

I’d like to see him do something that involves hard and demeaning work. You know, like real punishment.

In the real world, that ain’t gonna happen – at least, not how a lot of us would like it. I realize change comes slow to our governmental systems. And, frankly, my ideas make too much sense to get real consideration.

Luciano then goes into a discussion of how his dear ex-con buddy, “Screamin’,” says federal time is easy.  That, Luciano explains, is why they call it “Club Fed.”  Nothing gets past a columnist in Peoria.

Behind bars, Blago gets easy jobs and a chance to network with other pols and bigwigs. That’s hardly what I call punishment. So maybe it’s time to get creative.

Judges sometimes opt for alternate sentences nowadays. In Ohio, a man who ran from police was forced to jog around a jail every day. In Texas, a woman who tried to weasel Hurricane Katrina rebuild money had to clean houses. In California, a beer thief had to wear a T-shirt declaring his crime.

But those were state sentences. Federal sentencing guidelines don’t allow anything but incarceration.

Yet wouldn’t it make more sense to find a different way to handle Blago and others like him? A way that not only makes him pay his debt to society but takes the taxpayer off the hook?

Don’t get hung up in his mistaken assumption that there’s no room in federal sentencing for a little imagination.  Word that the guidelines are merely advisory probably hasn’t made it to Peoria yet, so it’s not his fault.  The Booker decision will be in his mailbox any day now.  Any day.

Make him work a 9-to-5 minimum-wage job – fast food, retail or whatever – so he can learn how the little guy squeaks by while earning money to help support his family. At night, he would have to stay at home – no restaurants or fun until his term is over.

Weekends, though, he would do very visible public service. Picking up trash on the highways, cleaning state Dumpsters, shoveling state-owned sidewalks – anything involving sweat and humility. And the aggrieved public could watch – perhaps with knowing smiles and pointing fingers – what happens when a government official brazenly goes bad.

Now, that’s effin golden – at least, as far as the public is concerned.

Effin?  The guy writes a newspaper column and the best he can do to express himself is write “effin”?  He’s a wild man.  As for his contention that a more custom-tailored sentence will make Blago “pay his debt to society,” it appears that Lucky is focused solely on the general deterrence component of sentencing.  Since Blago’s unlikely to hold another government position, he won’t be in need of specific deterrence.  He could use some rehabilitation, since we learned on the Apprentice that the guy is computer illiterate, which will definitely impair his future employment potential.

But there’s one additional issue that Luciano seems to ignore.  As far as I recall, the only thing Blago has been convicted of is lying to federal agents, who were investigating allegations of misconduct in office, the sale of Obama’s senate seat, for which he wasn’t convicted.  It’s not like I’m on Blago Watch, but I’m pretty sure that the retrial has been put off until the healing is completed from surgery to remove Blago’s foot from his mouth.  So what exactly is he talking about when he writes “what happens when a government official brazenly goes bad.”

Phil, or Lucky, or whoever, my suggestion is to put this very interesting column back into your pocket until the day after a jury returns a verdict that supports your views about Blago, at which time you’ll have something really great to stick in the paper.  But not now.  In America, we like to wait until after a guy is convicted before we argue about sentence.  I wonder how that will play in Peoria?