While recently the precise definition of “torture” has been a hot button issue in the USA, I have just been reading about another form of cruelty that will hopefully one day be abolished by the Supreme Court, and that is the sentence of “Life without possibility for parole”. Having read the harrowing tale of Kenneth E. Hartman, it seems clear that the death penalty is probably a more humane sentence, which is really saying something. This isn’t a short blast of utter terror like an execution or being waterboarded, but rather an unending daily misery that lasts for decades.
Personally, I’d rather be waterboarded, despite having also recently read the harrowing tales of Mancow Muller and Christopher Hitchens, two pro-Iraq-war commentators who stepped up to the plate and found out for themselves exactly what Waterboarding is like, afterwards reluctantly declared they were in no doubt that it is torture, and although they certainly didn’t say it, effectively concluded that certain members of the Bush administration are liars and war criminals.
There are unlikely to be any conservative pundits imprisoned for life without the possibility for parole anytime soon, but I’m sure if there were, and they still had the ability to get published, they would be arguing just as vehemently that this much slower form of torture must also be abhorred and abolished by any decent and humane society.
The only good thing about LWPFP, vs actual executions, is that it leaves a small chance that these individuals may eventually be released and rehabilitated by a more enlightened America after a change in the law, which surely seems a little more likely now Obama is the one nominating replacements for the Supreme Court.
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We have it here too, dont’ we? I thought “preventative detention” was effectively the same thing.
Admittedly it seems to be a sentence applied to recidivist paedophiles, and intractable repeat offenders like Graeme Burton rather than first-offence murderers, but we have it in NZ nonetheless.
Hmmm, true. Perhaps death should be an option for the prisoner. They can choose to stay alive, if they are of the opinion that they didn’t do it and may eventually be exonerated, or choose a quick exit. In practice I imagine this is sometimes achieved with fairly low levels of suicide prevention in jail, but I think in the case of Californian private prisons where you lose a valuable asset when a prisoner kills themself, they probably work quite hard to prevent that.
In practice I guess it’s just the fact that most jail sentences in the USA are way too long – if you don’t get a good lawyer – and this is just the far end of the curve.
These big moral questions are never as simple as we’d like. Maybe PD/LWPOP *is* the best decision in a small number of cases, and it’s just over-used in certain places due to the perverse incentives created by a private prisons industry with a lot of cash to spend on shaping public (and hence, political) opinion.
Rehabilitating them and putting them back into the general population is a myth. Better to work them like slaves (after all, they gave up their rights) and get some productivity out of them, or just kill them.
If you want to get conservative and dissuade violent crime, lob off their heads and put in on a stick in the town center. Put people back in the stockades. The punishment isn’t ‘cruel and unusual’ if it is ‘commonplace and ordinary’. Shunning and shame used to be a pretty darn good deterrent to all sorts of crimes. Sadly we’ve become a soft society, accepting all sorts of people and their perverse lifestyle choices.
You may want a ‘decent and humane’ society, but I’ll settle for one that is merely law abiding on a simple set of laws.
There are so many things wrong with that “uh huh” I barely know where to begin.
Punishments certainly *can* be both cruel and commonplace, and they certainly *were* in the dark ages. If you *really* want to experience the dark ages, I recommend emmigrating to rural Afghanistan, but personally I prefer more enlightened societies.
Furthermore, you suggest that the violent “punishments” you propose will actually dissuade violent crime. Quite apart from the fact that such punishments are undoubtably violent and arguably criminal acts in their own right, there is no evidence that they reduce the amount of violent, criminal acts by non-state actors in a society. If you bothered to do the research you would discover the correlation tends to run the other way.
Having said all that I do wonder what my position is on death sentence vs lock them up forever. Both are extreme penalties that should only be used on the very worst recidivists, but I’m not sure I’m ready to say that they should never be used, or that one is better than the other. I’m going to use the INTP defense and say “more careful study and analysis is required to draw a justifiable conclusion than I am actually prepared to put in right now”.
Apparently Mr. Hartman was unlucky in the timing of his crime. California’s death penalty statute has been in an on-again, off-again status for decades and it appears that the LWPOP sentencing option must have received similar treatment. Charles Manson has regular parole hearings and, IMHO, he would have been the perfect candidate for LWPOP as described by Mr. Hartman.
The Romans proved this as more the problem of people not being hungry and having jobs as dissuading violent crime. Perhaps the the punishments are violent, but its not criminal if its a “state” mandate.
I’m not saying that it would make sense for trivial crimes to have extreme sentences either.
As for the INTP defense, sure…that’s great if you’re trying to appear as a career politician.
Hmmm. Fair point. When I said “arguably criminal” I was saying that torture is against the Geneva conventions and it’s arguably criminal whether it’s “state sanctioned” or not, but I guess it’s fair to say that violent punishments by the state are not criminal acts per se. I’m sure there are various edge cases that could go either way.
There is no doubt that having a happy populace is a better protection against violent crime than violent punishments. Whether a happy populace and violent punishments *together* do an even better job is another question, but extreme punishments will tend to lead to a a less happy populace (via various indirect, systemic effects) which will then tend to lead to more crime, violent and otherwise, and it’s this somewhat vague, but inevitable progression that conservative minds have trouble dealing with.
The thing I have very little idea about is whether a happier populace will result, in the long term, from the LWPOP process, or the Death Row process, both, or neither, being part of the justice system.
The main point I wanted to make is that although both the DP and LWPOP are overused in todays America, the over-use of LWPOP gets very little coverage vs Torture or the Death Penalty, despite being, for some people at least, just as bad as the other two.
BTW I don’t think my INTP defense of “I don’t have enough facts, nor enough time to find the facts, so I’ve decided to avoid the question” is actually a very good political strategy. I’d make a lousy politician. Much more politically viable would be to say “I’ll get back to you on that” whether or not I actually intended to.
UH HUH writes “sadly we have become a soft society”. Surely he is not talking about America, because the US has a HUGE prison population, six or seven as many prisoners (as a proportion of the general population) as in European countries.
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