Subject: Re: The Pro-death penalty argument
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X-Comment: The Transnational Radical Party List
At the risk of restating the obvious, permit me to point out that there
*are* sound arguments against capital punishment. To address Dorry's four
points:
#1
> It is not inhumane to prevent the incorrigibly violent from committing
> heinous acts against innocent, law-abiding citizens.
Agreed. But the alternatives he lists, capital punishment:
> by dealing with them quickly and absolutely
and long term incarceration in U.S. prisons
> caging them in an 8 X 8 jail cell for decades at a time
is a false dilemma. There *are* other alternatives, including one
he dismisses (see #4) to adress the root causes of crime, poverty
and social injustice, as well as prison reforms so that the
brutal conditions in U.S. prisons which make them a breeding ground
for crime are replaced by conditions conducive to rehabilitation.
Such efforts do pay off. Western Europe is an example. Investigate,
for example, the laws and prison conditions in Scandinavia or the
Netherlands, and their social policies, compared with those in the
U.S. These methods may be less dramatic and may fail to satisfy the
appetite for revenge among those who disdain humane and civilized values,
but they are much more cost effective. California, for example, already
has more black people in jail than in college, and its prison population
has quadrupled since 1970, with a corresponding increase in violent
crime. Yet they voted in a law providing for "caging them in an 8 X 8
cell for decades at a time* for a third offense, which *need not be
violent* --posession of marijuana, for example suffices, while committing
them to spend $21 *billion* for new prisons. That same amount, spent on
addressing social injustice, poverty, racism, etc. would save many more
lives. It is a disgrace that the richest country in the world has
failed so miserably to provide a decent environment for all its citizens
and is now preparing to do the worse for the poorest and the powerless
among them.
#2
> How [will capital punishment raise the level of brutality in society]?
> Will the fact that our streets are safer and our living standards raised
> somehow breed an hitherto unknown hostility in each of us that will vent
> itself on a national scale?
Far from capital punishment's making the streets safer being a proven fact,
experience suggests exactly the opposite. Most apologists for capital
punishment seem oblivious to experience (e.g. there would be even more
crime than there is without it, a claim in turn unsupported), but where
they get their "proof" is unclear; maybe revelation, maybe speculation,
but not by reason or experience.
#3
Dorry mistakenly claims that critics of capital punishment hold that
statistics "prove" that it is not an effective deterrent. As I, and
many others have pointed out, what they show is that there is no
*verifiable* effect, given the way capital punishment is actually
carried out, a point Dorry concedes in #3. (New Jersey has only had
three executions, in all the time capital punishment has been on the
books since gaining statehood). My point, to repeat, is that if
capital punishment is to be an effective deterrent, it must be carried
out *much* more often and much more swiftly than has been in our history,
and even then, it may backfire by raising the anger and the desparation
of the poor, the deprived and the victims of social injustice to levels
which would make todays levels seem tame by comparison. And even if it
does succeed, it will indeed be at the expense of a brutalization of
society and at the expense of the ideals on which it was founded; the
KKK will look almost humane by comparison. Yes, the streets were safe
in Nazi Germany (if you forget the Gestapo, the holocaust, and the
midnight knock on the door) and their "living standards raised" while
it bred "unknown hostility...which [vented] itself on a national scale"?
But would even Dorry want to live in such a society? I think not.
#4
> lower (violent) crime rates in [Europe] exist not BECAUSE of the absence
> of CP but DESPITE it.
How does he know? He can always say that, which means that his opinion
is immune to facts derived from experience.
> Most of the violent crime committed in America is committed by black
Americans...What is the black population (or its analogue) in European
countries? In what great numbers are there disenfranchised, imporverished,
> Sweden?
There aren't great numbers of disenfranchised, impoverished or marginalized
people of a different color in Sweden, because Sweden has worked
assiduously to promote social justice for three quarters of a century.
Sweden also didn't import slaves, and in the U.S., racism and racial
prejudice aggravates a problem caused by neglect and greed, which the
nation now seems bent on exacerbating. One of the most incisive books
ever written (and one of the earliest) on race and poverty in the U.S.
was written by a Swede: _An American Dilemma_ by Gunnar Myrdal.
> If Adolf Hitler was captured after WWII, tried and convicted at
Nuremberg, what would have been the appropriate sentence?
Can you really think of an "appropriate" sentence in such a case?
It's hardly a question of deterring similar criminals--Hitler knew
he would be executed if caught; that's why he committed suicide.
But how can his death atone for the murder of six million Jews,
countless dissident Germans, many tens of millions of civilians,
not to mention fifty million combatants?
Craig Harrison,
San Francisco
