The Death Penalty Thread

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So am I bloodthirsty or simply naive? You can't seem to make up your mind, and far be it from me to tell an expert such as yourself what my own opinions mean.

Last edited by Dox47 on 14 Mar 2010, 3:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

Bloodthirsty is probably pushing it too far. And even naive is off base. You are obviously an intelligent capable person fascinated with a well developed precise technology and choose to dismiss as irrelevant the end use of that technology and, it seems to me, ignore the frightful consequences. You are in the tradition of Leonardo DaVinci who also devised innovative weaponry for an extremely savage era. And the savagery of our own era is explicit throughout the world. I find that extremely distasteful but that seems to be a minority opinion.

I'm reading this on sunday and it happens "The Running Man" is screening tonight on TV.

A most underrated gem of an 80's action flick, and one of the few instances I can think of where a good movie was made from a mediocre book. Stephen King wrote the book under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, and I can't really say it's bad, but it's really depressing and not at all like the movie, but the basic idea is there.

Plus Richard Dawson was in the movie.

That is why I favor Penal Colonies. Put the convicted persons in a place where they cannot bother the rest of us. If new evidence comes to light, they can be extracted and compensated for their lost time.

ruveyn

More seriously, here in New Zealand we could use one of our small outlying islands... Is there somewhere in the US already like that? I hear of somewhere called "Riker's Island" but maybe I'm thinking of Alcatraz...

There was a recent doco in NZ on the prison system, focusing on how it influences offenders, crime trends and perhaps society and comparing NZ's penal system to Finland's.

New Zealand has the second highest prison population in the world, and people are still calling for tougher prison sentences. Yet crime has not been affected by this. The majority of offenders incarcerated, committed crimes related to poverty or substance abuse, or learned their behaviour from family culture, or were abused.

Community based Rehabilitation, to help abuse victims or people who grew up in a violent setting come to terms with their trauma, and especially to help substance abusers (when this help is rendered correctly and over a long term) tends to be less expensive than incarceration, and much more effective in creating positive behaviour changes. As stated in the doco, prison is a "University of Violence", and if you're not violent when you go in you are very likely to be violent when you come out.

Finland used to have a high prison population. It changed it's laws and removed prison as a possible sentence for many offences. Now offenders are treated differently, including rehabilitation (which may need improvements), but also a range of other measures. Curiously, crime rates haven't necessarily changed much, suggesting using prison is an ineffective deterrence to crime.

I state all this as a counter to my previous statements, to say there are circumstances where I think the death penalty is not appropriate. It is not appropriate for some offences, and it is not appropriate when applied broadly to all violent offences, as it doesn't address the causes behind the offences.

It's when these causes cannot be addressed or rehabilitation is never possible, and the offender is still violent, that I think the death penalty becomes a possibility.