Lethal Injection Under Fire Again

[Chaerophon]

The primary reason for crime is due to poverty and uneducation.

Nonsense. The primary reason for crime is behavior. It is a combination of selfishness, greed, emotion, and lack of internal moral limits, and in some crimes, a lack of integerity. (Enron) And pride.

That point is far from nonsense. Crime has been shown to correlate with poverty, it is an empirically verifiable statistical fact. Unless you can defend the idea that the "impoverished" find themselves in such a position because they lack the "character" of the well-to-do, and that poverty effects are entirely non-systemic, then your point is lacking. Since a grossly disproportionate percentage of the population living below the poverty line are visible minorities who have been the historical subject of systematic disadvantages, I hope that you're willing to concede that systemic factors do contribute to crime rate... Otherwise, your claim might reasonably be extrapolated to become "minorities intrinsically lack moral fibre", a conclusion that I doubt you would like to draw.

Standard platitude, and of dubious veracity. Throwing money at a problem won't change human nature. It may sometimes alleviate some of the stressors on a person. The War on Poverty didn't end poverty, did it? You will always run into the problem: how much is enough?

Funny, there are many countries in the world that HAVE reduced poverty and relative advantage through systematic modification that involves "throwing money at" the problem of inequality. You know what else has gone along with movement in that direction? Reduced crime rates. I'm sure that you will try to throw me off the chase by claiming that "America's situation is unique" in light of the nation's diversity, but that would be bollocks. America is not the only country in the world facing problems of diversity, nor is it the only country in the world with open borders and permissive immigration policy.

There is not an absolute standard of "how much is enough". That is socially determined by how much people are willing to concede - and that is often dependent on what understanding they have of the reasons for impoverishment (at a systematic level), in the first place.

You are getting all indignant about 4 people per year possibly wrongly executed? I find your sense of justice lacking proportion, and please don't chime in with a slippery slope. Since justice is subjective, no big deal that we disagree.

Easy to say until it's your brother, father, sister or mother.

Put another way, 4 people per year, out of a prison population of 3 million.

What kind of a zero defects standard do you hold your fellow man to, Mith?

Interestingly, all of your numbers belie a simple point: his suggested solution does meet a zero defects standard. And by spending less money, to boot. Sweet trade-off, no?

You have to reshape someone's world view, and particularly their view of themselves, to rehabilitate them. Ask any recovering alcoholic. Prison does a poor job of that. How do you measure what someone is really thinking? How do you know you have "changed them?" You don't, and you can't. How do you get that kind of control over people's behavior, and withstand the legal challenges that prisoners have rights too? I don't think you can.

Killing prisoners is "better", in view of justice, than reforming the system? I'm afraid that there is no comparison... And don't come at me with "you're being pie-in-the-sky" - the cost of incarceration is a dead weight on the United States economy, and it is not entirely obvious (and there is no evidence that I know of to support the view) that a move towards crime prevention-via-social-reform rather than your increasingly expensive punishment-in-lieu-of-social-programs model would be any less cost-effective.

Anyways, how do you reshape someone's world view? I think that you know what I think - take some measures to reform their world. Before you say it, that's not socialism, that's pragmatism. If systemic factors are contributing to crime rate (and powerfully strong correlation between the two has been shown to exist), then perhaps it IS the system that requires reform in order to reduce crime and decrease the number of violators in the system/prisoners in the first place. BTW, this point on your part seems to contradict your earlier thoughts that crime is "behavioural" and unrelated to systemic factors such as poverty.

All prisoners with terminal life senteces are pure cost. They are Zero Value Added, and have demonstrated by their actions their disdain for the rules of society, and are indeed resource sinks: the money spent on them should and could be spent elsewhere, be it on better rehab sytems, on a few better teachers, better public defenders, or even on your postulated social workers.

Because society justifiably does demand a zero-defect standard for executions, the costs for execution will always be high - the appeals process is proof in the pudding. The American system is built on a belief in checks and balances; remove the checks on execution, and you will have less than desirable effects.