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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (43215)	2/4/2002 11:45:55 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 82486

This article appeared in the Washington Times on January 21, 2001. Book Review: Asking the Wrong Questions, Finding No Answers about the Death Penalty By James Q. Wilson aei.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions By Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell William Morrow, $25, 270 pages This book will make little difference in the debate about capital punishment because it asks the wrong questions and produces the wrong answers. The central questions about the death penalty are whether its imposition deters crime and whether, deterrent or not, its use is morally justified. Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, The American Conscience, and the End of Executions is focused on other people's opinions about the death penalty, arguing that since executions have become less popular in the United States the end of that practice is in view. The death penalty, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell conclude, "will not last much longer in America." That view rests, it seems, on the fact that the support for the death penalty has declined of late and might decline even further if more people believed that innocent persons are being executed or that life imprisonment without possibility of parole was the alternative for such killers. The authors point out that whites, men, Republicans, and higher-income people support the death penalty more than do their opposites. Were they to change their minds and think like blacks, women, Democrats and poorer people, we would all be better off. But they have not changed; in fact a majority of women and Democrats still support executions. These facts trouble the authors, but they have an explanation ready at hand: These people have a "desperate longing for control--to a fear that not only crime but just about everything else in one's life may be out of control." It is, of course, an explanation for which they offer not a shred of evidence. But they do not dwell much on one obvious reason for the (modest) decline in support for executions. The murder rate has dropped dramatically, and as has been true in the past, support for executions has also declined. It was not very high in the mid-1960s, but it rose sharply as the murder rate went up. In all likelihood the murder rate will rise again (it is already up sharply in Los Angeles and a few other cities), and if that happens, support for executions will also rise even though that support has been denounced by Mario Cuomo. We do not know whether the death penalty deters other criminals. It may, but no scholar has found convincing evidence that it has, and given the facts of the situation, none is likely to find it in the future. We have thousands of murders, some unknown fraction of which are first-degree murders of the sort to which the death penalty might be attached. Some unknown fraction of these homicides lead, after long delays to executions, and these mostly in a few states that rely heavily on the death penalty. Under these circumstances, it is next to impossible to say with any confidence that the death penalty deters crime. We do not know what fraction of all murderers are subjected to it or how its imposition might affect potential murderers. The authors do not refer to any of the interesting studies of this matter; instead, they supply a selective and uninteresting history of the remarks made by judges, jurors, wardens, prosecutors and governors who have reflected on the subject. We rightly worry that innocent people might be executed. Great attention has been given to a recent study by James Liebman, a professor at Columbia University, who claims to have found egregious errors in the imposition of the death penalty, but in his paper there was in fact no evidence that innocent people were being killed by the states. On occasion, this tragedy may occur, but that is not the main issue we must confront. The central issue is whether a decent society is right to impose the death penalty. European leaders think we are wrong to do so, even when people in some of their own countries favor it. Most intellectuals, I suspect, oppose its use. A minority of Americans oppose it. But the authors of this book make no systematic effort to explain why executions are morally wrong; they simply assume it is wrong and look with hope at the opinion polls. However they do quote the revealing remarks of one leading opponent of the death penalty, the scholar Hugo Adam Bedau. He said that he would be willing to let Timothy McVeigh be executed provided the state did not execute people who were not like McVeigh. That is an important remark, for it sets out the central problem. If a person would be willing to have McVeigh (or Hitler) executed what is it about their offenses that requires them to die? Presumably it is the number of the victims; McVeigh, after all, was like Hitler not in motives or opportunities, but only in killing a lot of innocent people. This leads to a line on inquiry: Do we punish people most severely only when they kill many others? What if they kill only a handful, but do so after inflicting gruesome tortures? Or what if they kill several innocent people after inflicting no torture but out of a depraved desire for sexual gratification at the sight of their deaths? Or what if they kill solely in exchange of money? These are serious matters about which reasonable people will differ. Answering those questions ought to be at the heart of any book (or any speech by Mr. Cuomo) about the death penalty, but they are not. Instead, in this trivial book we are supplied with some quotations from people who have had to make decisions coupled with a shallow interpretation of public opinion. This volume fills a much-needed void. James Q. Wilson is the chairman of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: Neocon who wrote (43215)	2/5/2002 3:52:56 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

"Lifton, huh? Not exactly someone I take seriously, sorry......" LOL!! No, his track record at Yale, and the high esteem in which he is held by the academic community, together with his numerous awards, must truly diminish his "seriousness" in your eyes, Neocon!!! ;-) Thank you for the great laugh!! scrippscol.edu Robert Jay Lifton is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center and Director of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York. He had previously held the Foundations' Fund Research Professorship of Psychiatry at Yale University for more than two decades. He has been particularly interest in the relationship between individual psychology and historical change, and in problems surrounding the extreme historical situations of our era. He has taken an active part in the formation of the new field of psychohistory. Dr. Lifton was born in New York City in 1926, attended Cornell University, and received his medical degree from New York Medical College in 1948. Her interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1948-49, and had his psychiatric residence training at the Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York in 1949-51. He was an Air Force psychiatrist serving in the United States, Japan, and Korea from 1951-53. He was Research Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard from 1956-61, where he was affiliated with the Center for East Asian Studies; and prior to that was a Member of the Faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry. From mid-1995, he has been conducting psychological research on the problem of apocalyptic violence, focusing on Aum Shinrikyo, the extremist Japanese cult which released poison gas in Tokyo subways. His book, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism was published by Metropolitan Books in October, 1999. His writings on Nazi Doctors (on their killing the name of healing) and the problem of genocide; nuclear weapons and their impact on death symbolism; Hiroshima survivors; Chinese thought reform and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; psychological trends in contemporary men and women; and on the Vietnam War experience and Vietnam veterans, have appeared in a variety of professional and popular journals. He has developed a general psychological perspective around the paradigm of death and the continuity of life and a stress upon symbolization and "formative process," and on the malleability of the contemporary self. Recent books include Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, (Putnam and Avon Books, 1995) (with Greg Mitchell) which explores the impact of Hiroshima on our own country; and The Protean Self; Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, (Basic Books, 1993) which describes the contemporary "protean" self and its expressions of fluidity and change as its possible relationship to species consciousness and a "species self" (related importantly to one's connection to humankind). Other books include: The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, (with Eric Markusen), (Basic Books, 1990). The Future of Immortality; and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (Basic Books, 1987). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), winner of the 1987 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history; the 1987 National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991 [1968]), which received the National Book Award in the Sciences, and the Van Wyck Brooks Award for non-fiction, in 1969The Broken Connection (which received the Martin Luther King Award in England), Harvard University Press, 1984. Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (with Richard Falk), Basic Books, 1991, [1982]. Last Aid: Medical Dimension of Nuclear War (edited with E. Chivian, S. Chivian, and J.E. Mack), Redding, CT: Freeman Press, 1982. Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans--Neither Victims Nor Executioners, (which was nominated for the National Book Award) Beacon Press, 1992 (with new Preface and Epilogue on the Gulf War [1983, 1968]. The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology, Basic Books, 1983 [1976]; Six Lives/Six Deaths; Portraits from Modern Japan (with Shuichi Kato and Michael Reich), Yale University Press, 1979. Explorations in Psychohistory; The Wellfleet Papers (with Eric Olson), eds., Simon & Schuster, Touchstone Books, 1975. Living and Dying (with Eric Olson), Praeger, 1974; History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and the Old, Survivors and the Dead, War and Peace, and on Contemporary Psychohistory, Random House, 1968. Boundaries: Psychological Man in Revolution, Touchstone, 1976 [1970]. Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Norton Library, 1976 [1986]. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, University of North Carolina Press, 1989 [1961]. Edited The Woman in America, Beacon paperback 1966 [1965]; America and the Asian Revolutions, Transaction Books, 1970; and Crimes of War (with Richard A. Falk and Gabriel Kolko) Vintage, 1971.