The death penalty is wrong! It's wrong morally, it's wrong socially and it's wrong economically. It is the reverse direction of where humanity should be heading.
Indeed, the punishment must and should fit the crime. Becoming a society-sanctioned killer is a most unbefitting role.
Unfortunately, prisons in America became a growth industry where there even exists a public-trading prison company; and it got to a point in time where in California more money was spent building prisons than on building schools. Indeed, something's wrong with this picture.
I think a good part of the problem is that prisons have lost quality and there are lots of contradictions. For example, we clamp down in free society trying to prevent drug use while drug use freely goes on behind prison walls. Think. If we can't keep drugs out of prisons, how can we realistically expect to keep them out of a free society?
Meanwhile, those arrested for drugs invariably end up behind prison walls. Indeed, the drug war wastes valuable prisons resources, especially such resources as needed in order to make prisons what they should be: Quality Hell!
It's my view that drug offenses should not be an imprisoning offense and that those who do go to prison should be the ones who truly deserve to be there: murderers, rapists and robbers, etc.
Capital punishment solves nothing except to prove society itself can become killer--and in the olden days the hangings were well-attended, huge public square events replete with frills of laughter and wonder and whiskey both during and afterwards.
I think it's better to make prisons such that absolutely no human would want to be in one. Moreover, I think a life confined behind walls with hardened work, barebone necessities and the continued thinking about the horror of one's own actions is sufficient punishment.
By keeping capital punishment as a measure indeed victim families are forced over and over to relive the event by continually having to appear in the courts and in the dispositional process--and the pain unfairly lingers on.
Also, by killing the killer the question must frequently remain in the mindset of the victims: Am I right to want to have someone killed myself? Why not leave the killer with the perpetual thinking: "I shouldn't have done what I did," and harsh daily reminders over and over and over again. |
