Just Another Political Post.

[whyBish]

But, the costs of a death sentence are not just the 10 cents for a bullet. People often spend years on death row, which is much costier then normal prison.

But is of course not just very sec a question of "what do they deserve" and "how do we pay least", there is also the question of civilization and common decency. And more important then what do criminals deserve, is how can we make sure there will be less crime......harder punshments are not the answer, history told us that.

So on one side you have the guy who raped and killed 5 women and children who deserves the hardest punishment for that....but this same guy (a complete mental case of course) will not be kept from doing the things he does, just because he can get a certain heavy punishment. So if we want to stop things like this to happen, we should find other ways.

It is known that poverty is a basis for crime as well (I'm not talking about the mental case now). I don't believe that people are not responsible for their acts because they are poor, but I do know that punishing them harder is not a solution to end this crime. Ending poverty is.

So the question is what do you want?. Do you want to make sure that everybody has to pay in a major way for their deeds and point all your attention to that. Or do you point your attention on actually trying to bring back crime numbers.

If your living in a small vilage where not much happens I can imagine you will favour the first option. If however you live in area's where there is much crime, you would like to have solutions first.

Please understand, that I do think people should be punsihed for crimes of course.
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There is no need for them to spend years on death row. If a jury of twelve finds them guilty beyond reasonable doubt (although over here with the move to allow 11-1 decisions those would have to be voided from the penalty), then get the job done rather than clogging up the legal system and jails.
I'm particularly with Occhi when he says don't be in stupid places at stupid times... one ought to know not to 'polish ones firearm at a gas station' ;)

It's not about deterring crimes from happening, it's about stopping future crimes by a proven criminal... if you want to deter crimes, this measure at least wont make people more likely to commit. You can do this and still put your other deterrent policies in place such as reducing poverty... in fact the amounts saved could be directly transferred to the poor if you want.

"Common decency" is about not commiting capital crimes in the first place. I thought that would have been obvious. If you break that rule then don't expect society to be decent in return.

Mind you, I'd probably also argue that capitalism demands killing those that would take more from the state than give... j/k :P