This debate has been raging on in the Image of the day about the death penaly and how we should controll/punish/deterr killings. my personal thoughts are that we should be as tough as possible in the beginning, i.e. now, to get the message out that taking someone's life is not the thing to do if you wish to stay alive.


There have been some other ideas about this, including a penal colony to send just theifs and other law-breakers in general, but my favorite alternative to the death penalty has to be lifelong solitary confinement.



Any thoughts?

I Have No Opinion(c), but who wants to start a pool on how many messages it will take before Nazis, Communists, Police States, Dictators, or Satan are mentioned?

Steve

___________
Bomb President White House Death Terror Allah
Chew on that, Carnivore

<i>I Have No Opinion registered (c) Republican National Non-Committee</i>

Makes me sick when someone kills somebody.

Made me sick when they did it at Waco.

Made me sick when they did it in OK City.

Made me sick when they did it at Terre Haute.

Life is everything. Killing is always always wrong.

In some cases I feel its just far to light, i think its a tougher punishment to know you'll be locked in a cell for the next 40 odd years than to be put to sleep quickly and painlessly...

(and i'm glad you started this and took my advise verbatim, but in general its not a good idea to take my advise, god knows where you might end up =)

Too late to start the pool. An interesting aspect of the McV situation is the reluctance of anyone to discuss why it occurred. It really is the "Culture of Death" that JP2 talks about. McV joins the army and is trained to kill. Papa Bush sends him off to make the world safe for feudal monachies. He gets decorated for his enthusiasm in killing. He comes home and the BATF is killing civilians while the press fails to criticize actions taken on the shakiest of evidence. McV was a maniac but he was our maniac. We wired that madness into him. Every time we kill as a society we create more of the same hardness in the heart. The Feds are gonna kill another messed up human being this morning... getting used to it?

See, I wouldn't do it painlessly. Lethal injection is a joke, an attempt at compromise between the ACLU and the Right Wing.

Call me crude if you must, but we had it right in medieval times. Public executions, where when someone does wrong, the citizenry see the consequences.

Perusing my library of DM rants, I came across one that had some merit:

"Now, you see, what I would do is put the executions on live, sponsored pay-per-view TV, and give the money to the victim's families. 'Tostitos Presents: The Menendez Bros. Razzle-Dazzle Tag-Team Snuff-A-Rama!'"

~Mike

Short reply as I'm hurrying off to work..
 

Two things.. as a "big fan" of J.S.Mill and Utilitarian thought at large I find it difficult to determing the best off situation for the society as a whole when it comes to criminal execution (case by case basis).

I do tend to think that since we have not yet perfected the way of identifying the truly guilty, we should not have the death penalty.

Another point deals with (gradually) giving too much power to (supposedly) democratic regimes.. what if (for whatever reason) that regime turns more dictatorial or is overthrown by a dictatorial one.. well it would be much easier for "new" regime to point back and say.. well YOU have death penalty.... (you see my point.. read EXPANSION)

On yet another hand.. what punishment should we apply if not the death penalty? Gulags? Again.. since we can't yet truly prove guilt in most "death penalty deserving" cases.... plus there's the earlier expansion point..

Last by not least.. we're really showing our value for human life when we take life of X in order to say that x taking Y's life was wrong. (Some will say.. Utilitarianism.. eye for an eye.. well not quite.. there's the "overall," "general" good.. not just what happends "to" Y's relatives, etc..

Hrm.. it's too early :)

hey Chewbaccus, while were at it why not establish a full on unreal-ournament/deathmatch arena, give em all guns and let them run loose, in america it'd make billions!

The prisons in this country are already death arenas...

Since being out of work, I've had WAY too much time on my hands to watch Court TV and The Learning Channel. Court TV had a great story on the Marion State Prison--the first Supermax prison in this country. (Driving by it on I-57 in southern Illinois gives you that queasy feeling.) When the Federal Government first made it a Supermax, things inside were incredibly lax. Then two guards were killed in one day in 1983 (not to mention, the prison was the site of an infamous attempted jailbreak--that's another story). A man convicted of killing one of the guards was sent to Leavenworth, where a special cell was created in the lower levels of the prison. The man is not allowed any human contact (other than a guard bringing his meal I assume), has his lights on 24 hours a day, and has not been heard from in 10 years! Marion then went to lockup 23 hours a day...it is generally considered the toughest prison in America.

As a whole, I do not support the death penalty; however, I make an exception for Mr. McVeigh. The man killed 168 absolutely innocent people as a form of government protest. That's just wrong. There are far better things he could have done. And continuing to insist that the victims' deaths were justifiable...for me, that man was begging to be killed. But in general, the whole "eye for an eye" b.s. is just that--b.s. Leave that sorta thing to the fundamentalist Bible thumpers. To me, being locked up for the rest of your life, particularly at Marion, serves well. Think about it...you are by yourself 23 hours a day, and under intense surveillance by guards...little contact with others. That right there is enough to drive you insane. Works for me. :-)

[Edited by sycamore on 06-20-2001 at 09:42 AM]

i frankly dont care what the hell the bible says. its a story book with a bunch of hippie followers. what it says is based on the wrong fact that everybody holds everything to their hearts like they might need it to save their life. it does not apply in some instances like stealing merchandise. being in jail overnight and in court the next day would be enough of a hassel, but some people just dont see the light.

killings are another story. they should make you NOT want to kill again. they should be a detterrent. the more you put a person in contact with other people the less they will think about what they did. hence solitary confinement. but the problem is that they not only think about what they did, they think about everything else, and go insane. which makes them not suitable to be a functioning member of society.


but this is no way a cut-and-dry case. it has its ins and outs that make the whole thing get spun wildly off kilter. like school killings-are they old enough to fully understand what they did? do we want to ruin their life? they could be a perfectly happy and stable human being but get pushed to the point where they snap.


and i have to put in a few words about school killings while i am at it. i think that they are just a few kids that were pressured into acting in a position that they normally do not act under, and profiling the kids that are going to hurt themselves and others is a bad idea. and i think that part of this school violence is the nation's attitude. we are a split country due to the presidential race and the senate numbers. and i have noticed a grassroots 'soccer mom' type movement. these people raise their kids to the highest expectations and want laws past that make other parents care for their children. they are the people that want abortions to be illegal. but this is not all the soccer moms and it is some other groups too.

just my $0.02

I think I see where you're coming from, Verbatim. The guys that perpetrate these kinds of acts don't seem to feel it inside. The point I'm trying to make is that those of us in the broader society need to make sure we up hold a standard of conduct and continue to feel it as Dag expressed it. To me, it doesn't matter what philosophy you adhere to to understand that perpetuating violence drags the whole society down. I'm not talking about some hippy-dippy Koombyah singing new agey circle of love take yer prozac twice a day book burning internet censoring feel good jazz. I'm talking about the UTILITY of not flippin off the disengaged yuppie on the car phone in traffic. As individuals we must be accountable for our negative impact on society. We have to embrace our personal responsibility unlike those soccer moms you astutely mentioned.

As far as student violence goes, we need to consider what we as adults "model" (remembering with some amusement a particularly lame educational theory indoctrinaton) to young people. We kill the McVs when they get in the way. We kill the Iraqis when they get in the way. We jail pot heads for not fitting in. We, through government, use force to solve our problems. We force kids into schools they don't fit in. We force their parents to pay for it. The soccer mom forces the school to counsel lil' Timmy, when she doesn't want to deal with him personally across kitchen table.

They have once-a-week Prozac now, Griff. Which amazes me since I have been on one of those similar class of drugs, and I can't see having an extended-use drug affecting your brain chemistry.

I think I'm in the hippie class although I don't look like one. My own approach to life is to try to find the good in people. I used to hate all the suburban tank-driving soccer moms, now I think, well hell, they're just trying to make a life for themselves and their kids. And chances are, even if they're mean one minute, if you sat down and talked with them they would be more like us than unlike us. They might not be as well informed and may have some wrong ideas, but don't we all have wrong ideas?

Finding the good in the Waco people or in McVeigh is harder but it strikes me right in the heart that the bad in both of them is identical. Both of them killed innocents with a larger cause in mind. The question is, where did they get the idea that killing was a solution? That is the evil we have to fight, that's my two cents.

This whole thread is awesome!

jag, I had that thought, but in regards to easing the overcrowdedness in the prison system.

Here's the plan: Take all the hard criminals - lifers and above on down to say...20-50 years, and put them in a giant gladiator-style tournament to the death. The winner gets a life on a tropical island or something.

~Mike

Chewbaccus: can we add Arnold to that group? Without him it's just not the same..

e
 

i personally know the benefits of looking for the good in people, but it is hard and human nature makes us get pissed and hate people. but that is part of the challenge of creating a higher society. you have to take the time not to stereotype criminals and treat every case different. that is part of the media's problem. they stereotype like hell, and they do it from everyone from McV to Bush and Monica. BUT that is also also the problem of the school board members and principles that suspend kids for saving another kids life and drawing pictures of guns and using sign language on a bus.

thats not teh point. explained best, its like a little kid behaving badly. you either treat them like little kids and give them easy to administer punishment or treat them older and just talk to them and do something that will be more humane. you have to know if the killer is going to kill again out of prison you give him/her/it/they/we/us/y'all a harsh penalty that will teach them not to do it again (death or solitary confinement) or treat them humanely (maybe a couple of years in prison) and know that they would have learned their leason. hence another human nature problem--people decieve. they take advantage of the legal system to get an easy penalty just to get out of jail or avoid the death penalty. and the whole temporary insanity plea is the biggest load of BULLSH1T.



to anyone that thinks i make sense: go get your head checked, your insane.

I have to agree with sycamore, but yes, it does tend to make people go insane, oddly enough but goddamn, i doubt any of those people are going to be released again anyway.
Supermax's are for people who need to be kept a long way from any other human life, they aren't getting out into the public again in most cases, i think that’s the best substitute for the death penalty, which really, is too light, just think, I can kill 168 people for my cause, then be put painlessly to sleep after incredible media attention

As for school killings, i think they are simply of product of a very fucked up generation which I’m member of, caused by a very fucked up society. While i am not even going to suggest justifying those very sick individuals at columbine (I find arguments like ‘temporary insanity sickening, people have to take responsibility for their actions and a lot of things would be solved, like stupid legal cases) and others i have seen first hand how the system tends to handle those kids with problems, drug em up, dump them in a center for a while and they'll be fine, all it does it fuck them up further DRUGS DO NOT SOLVE PHYCOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN KIDS when you've been abused by your parents, ostracized by your peers, ignored by your teachers, teased, bullied and abused its too bloody late in allot of cases, i know kids who want to 'pull a columbine' thank god they can't get guns, they all have been directed to overworked physiologists who give them perceptions and that’s it. Time to tackle the SOCIOECONOMIC causes for these things, coz its time to face the ugly truth that these kids are the sons of the problem in society, the growing poverty gap, apathy, disillusionment, society has stopped caring, and this is what happens. I know the ‘these were just normal kids we didn’t see it coming’ argument, and sorry, but its bullshit, if you don’t notice you kids doing these things, or multiple guns and bombs in there rooms you’ve got to stop working the 12 hours days and maybe just spend a millionth of your day with them. I personally spend buggar all time with my mum (split up parents) but I spend enough that she knows who I am at least…
</rant>

There is one thing to note about these school killings (and I or someone else may have mentioned it before): They have all happened in rural areas or in suburbs. And they have all been committed by whites (at least to my recollection...don't remember the San Diego case). Had this happened in, say Philadelphia, people would have probably just said, "See...look what happens in inner city schools." But had this happened in, say Warminster (a suburb), people would have been shocked and outraged: "How can this happen in our community?" In general, it seems that things don't tend to get SERIOUS attention until they occur in the suburbs--drug use/abuse, shootings, etc.

At the same time, no one has seemed to come up with the WHY of all this. And we may never know. In the case of Columbine, I think the kids were simply outsiders and didn't have a better way within themselves to deal with it. We can't point the finger at Marilyn Manson or KMFDM. And I don't think it's completely fair to point the finger at parents...and this applied to ANY type of crime. There are simply some people in this world that are BAD. There are also some kids that are simply hard-headed and tend to follow rather than lead. There are a ton of factors involved in all of this...and all too quickly, people want to blame one thing--in the case of Columbine, it was Marilyn Manson first, then the parents were under the microscope. As much as people may think I'm insane, those two shooters were victims too, in their own way.

I was very fortunate that I had a loving mother and stepfather, a roof over my head, and Catholic schooling. I am also fortunate that I made the right choices as a teenager (other than occasional alcohol and drug use...but that's another story ;-) ). I can't make people do anything, but I always try to stress positivity to the younger generation...I hope it has sank in in some way. I hope my good example has made an impression on my 18-year old brother, who seems to be on the right path.

They were victims, victims of an intolerant uncaring society. Pardon the rant before i meant to add </rant> but i forgot. I also agree blaming things like music and culture is just stupid, its politicians looking for scapegoats, the music is shaped by the culture as much as the culture is shaped by the music, there are allot of angry kids out there. I listen to the same bands, linkin park copped allot of crap for example, but I’m not about to go and shoot anyone (well, maybe my IT teacher but that’s another story).

(As you can tell this is one of my hobby horses)