Quote:
Originally Posted by madcorgi
Jeff, I think your argument suffers from binaryism (a word I made up). People will not fall neatly into "feral" and redeemable categories. There are as many gradations as there are people. Where's the line? It's a pretty important line--maybe even so important that it shouldn't be a line at all. Maybe something else should come into play . . . hark . . . those are the ghostly echoes of the founding fathers I hear, asking us: WTF, Dudes? How come you forgot all about Due Process.
Not to mention that we in the US have not exactly covered ourselves in glory as to whom we incarcerate. Every year, prisoners are exonerated on DNA evidence or other proof of innocence, innocent folks who served decades because they were either wrongly accused, had confessions beaten out of them, were wrongly convicted, are routinely under-represented because we starve of PD offices. You can bet more than a few wrongly accused have been executed over the years. So--what makes us so sure that as we all merrily wave to the buses headed off to the gas chambers that we have made the right choice? Makes me kinda uncomfortable.
|
We have covered all of this over the course of this discussion, Terry. So, in summary:
Yes, we incarcerate too many people for too trivial of offenses. There has to be another way. For those trivial offenses.
Yes, we wrongly convict people. We've established that maybe we should not execute on a first
conviction (I emphasize that because it's often not a first
offense).
We have narrowed our "qualifications" to violent repeat offenders. Nobody gets "wrongly convicted" multiple times. I proposed that our already established "three strikes" laws, wherein these violent offenders are incarcerated for life with no parole, be executed instead. I believe we can be relatively certain that this lot is beyond redemption.
We have tried our current method for decades. We have mountains of data that we have accumulated regarding recidivism vs. rehabilitation rates. They are not good. Actually, they well and truly suck. No one is happy with the results, not even you. Isn't the classic definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results? We have tried and tried. Maybe it's time to try something else.