Death Row Inmates - The mentally ill

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I'm hoping to start a civilized debate over the use of the death penalty in the U.S.
I don't live in the U.S. but I've read and heard news about its extensive use of the death penalty - even for those suffering psychotic breakdowns prior to the crimes they've committed.

In most other westernized countries (mainly in Northern/Western Europe) such people are (often) not even sentenced to jail, but to mandatory psychiatric treatment, living in psychiatric hospitals. And they're called patients, not inmates.

It's not that we have more serious crime in Europe than in the U.S.
I even remember some statistics showing that the murder rate is higher in the U.S. compared to EU.

So why do the U.S. insist on its use of the death penalty for people who needs treatment rather than punishment? It's not that you're going to scare people off crime, if the reason they're criminals is due to mental illness in the first place.

Because of the Evangelical/Fundamental "Christian" conservative mind-set that dictates all crimes should be punished.

You know ... sinners will be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone for all eternity ... that sort of thing.

I think there is ableism involved in the criminal system. I noticed that it seems like that the majority of death row inmates have a mild intellectual impairment or a borderline low IQ, have some sort of mental illness and they all seemed to have had a bad childhood. Lot of it is caused by lack of understanding of what an intellectual impairment is and people have this bias idea what intellectual impaired people are incapable of so when they do a bad crime, they think they are not intellectually impaired.

IMO I think you are more likely to be sentenced to death if you have a mental illness or a intellectual impairment. You are also more likely to get in trouble with the law because of lack of understanding of the law and getting involved in wrong groups of people and wanting to please. Take it that a ten year old may know that it's wrong to kill but if an adult told them to do it and used manipulation like "of you really cared about me, you would do this" they would do it because they felt forced and pressured. Now imagine if someone had the mental age of a ten year old? The court of law would not care. There was an actual ten year old who shot his mom to death because his father forced him and the kid didn't get in trouble with the law but the dad did and the boy grew up with regrets blaming himself and he appeared on the Dr. Phil show about it. I think he was on the autistic spectrum he said.

And some people with an intellectual impairment would only commit a crime if they were with the wrong person.

Also another thing people don't want to touch is linking mental illness to crime because I think they are concerned it will reinforce the stigma against mental illnesses. But I also don't want to pretend all people with mental illnesses are angels. Look at cluster B for example.

Also the US has been getting rid of mental hospitals since the 1950s and there are very few around now. Now prisons house more people with mental illnesses than they did before.

If God/Satan/whoever is going to deal with sinners anyway, why the need for human intervention?



That's scary.

Closing the "Sanitoriums" and opening more prisons seems to be as much of an economic measure as a political/religious one -- for half the cost, any government can warehouse all of their "undesirables" in just a handful of locations, instead of housing the mentally ill where they may receive the treatment they need, and incarcerating the criminals to keep them from victimizing the public again.

Sadly, there seems to be a significant overlap involving both mental illness and criminal behavior.  No, I am not saying that all criminals are insane, or that all mentally-ill people commit crimes.  I am saying when a person exhibits both criminal behavior and mental illness, which treatment should have priority -- incarceration or rehabilitation?

I am not the one to be asked, since I did not make up those rules.

I know, I was only asking because I doubt it is a Christian-conservative ideology. Conservative christians have the mental capacity to ask that question too - "why the need for human intervention if divine punishment anyway.".

Since they don't answer that question, I make the logical deduction that the divine punishment plays no role in whoever favors the opinion of imprisonment/death penalty instead of rehabilitation.

As you said in the post above, it might be as simple as economics.

I say, it could very well be a combination of economic incentive + sadistic behavior of the American public.

Those who think that money are worth more than human life, are evil.
They are not mentally ill. They deserve a place on death row instead.

Note that it is not necessarily the American public that demands punishment for criminal behavior, but the lawmakers the public elects (and who run for re-election under the "Law & Order" banner) -- change the lawmakers, and change the laws.

The public elects the lawmakers who impose the death penalty for the mentally ill instead of rehabilitation and treatment, because the public are evil against the mentally ill.

Thanks, now I'm gonna be singing this all afternoon:

https://vocaroo.com/15cn09rcqYG6

... and the politicians run on campaigns that play on the public's fear of criminal behavior, using the most "insane" crimes as dog-whistles against the mentally ill.  It is a vicious circle.

And I have to admit that most voters lack the skills or the motivation to find out the truth behind the campaign slogans and party platforms expressing "Law and Order" -- the trigger-happy cowboy cops shooting black people in the back, the sociopathic cops slowly suffocating their immobilized black victims to death and claiming it was justified, and the allegedly well-trained cops "mistaking" their service weapons for non-lethal tazers and murdering black children in front of their families -- these "Law & Order" candidates pay lip service to eliminating institutionalized racism while increasing funding for a nationalist police state.

Yes, I blame leucocentric voters as a contributory cause, and career politicians as a proximal cause; but I blame the people wearing the badges for willingly becoming the immediate causes of violent murders as tools of a police state.

That has all the depth and creativity of "My Sharona".

Now you have something else to listen to!

It's a philosophical disagreement. Talk to a lot of Americans and you'll realize a lot of them (not all) believe in retributive justice. Eye for an eye, "he got what he deserved," that kind of thing. Even I fall into it sometimes, though I'm getting better. You can't get rid of the death penalty without the culture shifting away from this idea. Without the desire for revenge, the death penalty becomes very distasteful.

Not really my opinion but I think most Christians believe if you are not "punished" in this life for something, you are in the next. Implying that if you are "punished' in this life the consequences are milder in the afterlife.

Also this comes to mind,

"That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" - Matthew 5:45

So, yeah life is not always fair down here but is in heaven is what I gather from that.

Paradoxically, in France, devoted christians (catholics) actually fiercely oppose the death penalty, even those who are conservative on other issues (for example, LGBT rights) ...

Strange how the Christian fundies in the US are pro-life ,yet it’s ok to kill criminals.
Hypocrites.