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Whatever other problems society has don't excuse letting someone who does something you seem to agree is reprehensible go unpunished.

Agreed. I have no problems with punishing the guy for the criminal destruction of private property if it applied in this case. But I would ask you this: Who did this man wrong? Did he wrong the inmate, the cats, or just our sensiblities? Was the inmate allowed to have cats? If there was a rule that no pets are allowed, then the inmate had no power of disposition over the cats. Were the cats wronged? Impossible, because cats don't have "rights". So really, that leaves our sensiblities as what suffered the wrong. My sensiblities suffer all the time, but the law should't allow me to receive compensation every time I'm outraged about something.

And MaggieMay is right that something is criminal pretty much whenever the legislature passes laws saying it is, your property or not.

I can't argue with that. I might think the legislature is goofy passing such laws, but even bad law is law nonetheless. But I must add that legislating a standard of "deviancy" and "cruelty" is a slippery slope at best.

The "victim" is society; we find it disgusting that someone would be so cruel to a living thing, and thus we (through legislatures) make it illegal. You don't need to give cats their own rights to prohibit cruelty to them, whether or not they have owners. There are plenty of other crimes like this where there is no human victim (like drug laws, though that is a very different can of worms).

The guard broke a law and he was tried and convicted in accordance with the law. No big deal.

If there are any further conclusions to be drawn I would say that

- The guard was doing what he did to torture the inmate not the kittens. He was trying to show his power and dominance over the inmate, and to hurt the inmate in a cruel and unusual way. In a way, this is a sort of rape, an act of brutality, power and humiliation.

- My guess would be that prison guards in general don't fare well as part of a general prison population, and a prison guard that became a prisoner in this particular manner will fare particularly poorly precisely because of the above.