What happened to compassion, forgiveness, and rehabilitation?

Your problem is drawing up a set of rules that would qualify someone for execution.

Heinnous murder, easy enough, but a lifetime criminal, perhaps with a string of burglary convictions, how many convictions is enough ? 10, 20, what about equating that to say a few street robberies, and how many of those equals one rape ?

Do we point score offences, hit a certain number and you’re out ?

It’s easy enough for me to see which ones will never make the grade, but how do you control what is effectively my opinion ?

In principle there might be an argument for getting rid of such wastrels, but enacting it would mean long appeals procedures, there would be strange anomalies as politicans of the day recategorised offences according to public mood, we have seen this with the three strikes rule where one offender got a life sentence for stealing a piece of pizza.

Even those on the side of the angels have many flaws and will get it seriously wrong, this is why in the US the appeals procedure for capital offences is supposed to be very thorough.

I personally would not have too much difficulty in selecting and executing certain criminals, those who you would categorise as lifetime drains on society, but that should disturb you, think of how easy it would be for someone like me to get too adventurous, and think about what society would be like if folk like me could be let loose with judicial killing.

Just give me the gun and the warrant and maybe a mop.

Do you think that the criminal justice system is a good one if it could create folk like me, who could kill so casually ? It would also be a reflection on the rest of society too, including yourself, you would be giving me your permission to select and kill multiple serial petty offenders.

Be careful what you wish for.

AHunter, you have an … interesting … view on criminology. You believe we should forgive them, feel their pain, seek to understand the reasons why they do the things they do, and each side must learn to change so they can live together. But if that doesn’t work, then fuck it, just kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. It’s like some one mind melded Gandhi and Himmler.

But the consensus is that the best course lies somewhere in the middle ground rather than in either, or in your case both, ends of the spectrum. Incarcerate criminals (which despite your post does seem to work - incarceration rates are up, crime rates are down), offer them reasonable opportunities for rehabilitation, establish controls on their environment (it’s a little bit more than “yelling at them and imposing rigid rules and coercions upon them”), and set up a system to determine which criminals are likely not to commit further crimes if released back into the world.

And while you may feel it’s out of style, rest assured that thousands of man-hours are be devoted every day to trying to come up with better ways to rehabilitate criminals. I see you’re a fellow New Yorker, so if you’d like to volunteer to help out, just say the word and I can give you some people to contact who’d be happy to have your services.

Well, I did some ATI work as a college student. The majority of my time is spoken for at this point, but maybe I could do something. I do believe in community service and ISP, although I’d like to see more radical plans given a try. And I hope they gut those stupid Rockefeller-era mandatory sentence guidelines.