People in this country want to kill people (capital punishment ) to show that killing is wrong.
One motivation is pour encourager les autres, a line from Voltaire’s Candide, meaning “to encourage the others”. You punish transgressions harshly to act as a deterrent. The hope here is that very few people actually need to be punished this way, but almost everyone falls in line. If you have a more moderate punishment, you may get people thinking that the crime is worth the potential punishment and doing it anyway.
Littering, for example, is a relatively minor crime that generally goes unpunished (and the punishment itself is often minor). Collectively, this causes great harm and expense. One could argue that making the punishment much more severe would decrease littering activity at a low cost (since almost no one would get punished in this way).
Another reason that this happens is that people strongly disagree about how bad certain acts are. Certain sexual acts are, depending on who you ask, totally fine, or the worst possible thing imaginable. People with different beliefs about these things often have very strong cultural and religious justifications for their beliefs. If you believe that a supreme being will severely punish not just the participants but the society that condones a given sexual act, then you’re likely to want to punish that act severely in turn.
Oh, no, it’s not just the US that’s hell-bent on revenge.
As for religion: you know the expression “one eye for one eye”? It’s from the Bible, and actually an upper limit imposed when the Jews realized that “if we keep taking two eyes for one, the whole world will end up blind” (they were only re-phrasing a legal principle other civilizations already had in their books): nowadays we express it as “the punishment must fit the crime”.
I suppose Saudi Arabia is a haven for rehabilitation along with other luminaries such as North Korea or does your Western-centric mind include only European social democracies as the “world”? :rolleyes:
That’s because it is not killing that is wrong-but murder.
BTW, I don’t support the death penalty unless the criminal is convicted of multiple murders.
When I was referring to kidnapping being the greater evil, I was specifically referring placing people under lawful arrest. When someone breaks the law, we (society) send the men with guns out to kidnap the offender. I cannot see how this level of force, and deprivation of liberty, is justified for actions that are neither aggressive nor violent.
I am well aware of the dangers of secondhand smoke; though I wasn’t aware that those dangers can pass through walls, across property lines, and through walls again to cause me harm. Please enlighten me if you have proof that my neighbor’s smoking in the privacy of his own home, several hundred yards away from me, has any direct effect on my health.
This is more of a GQ, but in the interests of the debate: Do the health risks of secondhand smoke in an outdoor area even rise to the level of toxins we are exposed to from automobile exhaust, or any significant level at all? I hate the smell of cigarettes, but again, outdoors, I never have assumed it to be anything beyond the level of a mere annoyance, akin to that guy hogging the passing lane on the freeway: A damn nuisance, but really nothing more than that.
Punishing illicit substance use–indeed; making substances illicit in the first place–results from the thinking of morons.
The idiotic war on drugs devastates communities and can easily be shown to be counterproductive in toto.
I think the main motivation for that particular disproportionate punishment is a (carelessly considered) notion that punishing drug use has a net benefit related to minimizing the use of a potentially harmful substance. The cost of the war on drugs is not weighed.
It is still doing the same thing…killing another human being for killing another human being. How many multiple murders must one commit for you to justify it?
Two separate incidents, or a a particularly bloody single incident (ie a spree killing) to ensure guilt.
You should watch Reefer Madness some day. The moralists tried to demonstrate that pot caused all sorts of harm. I’m sure that the fact that it was used by jazz men and other undesirables had something to do with it.
That lots of people today have first hand knowledge that a joint doesn’t turn someone into a sex-crazed maniac I’m sure has helped in legalization efforts.
I’ve seen and enjoyed “Reefer Madness.” Without naming any names or places, there was a time when that film and a joint went together like barbecue and beer…
My father-in-law (who did a little scat singing with the Austin High gang) thought it was pretty funny, too.
Sorry, state sanctioned killing is a disgrace to our country. What other industrialized country kills to show killing is wrong?
Turing was convicted of homosexuality in 1952: the punishment was chemical castration. Isherwood… I don’t know which Isherwood you are referring to. The first example seems stale to me.
The US and China have 2 of the highest incarceration acts in the world. So yeah, I would suggest that the OP take a more representative example if he wants to talk about punishment. For example, not only has Spain banned the death penalty, nobody can serve more than 40 years in jail, no matter how heinous the crime. The 40 year limit applies to terrorism, otherwise you get a 30 year limit. Cite: Why did the Madrid bombers get 40,000-year sentences?
Mandatory minimum sentencing is mostly a US phenomenon, with some exceptions. The wiki article lists 5 examples of punishments that seem disproportionate if you click through the links. I’m unaware of such examples from other countries. Mandatory sentencing - Wikipedia
Somewhere on the internet is a 3 strikes database. Here’s a chart of the rise in incarceration in California: from 1994 to 2000 it rose from something like 5000 to something like 40,000. The prison guard unions and the prison construction industry loved that.
http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_Strikes/3_StrikesAccessories._/3_StrikesAccessories._/3_Strikes%20Accessories/media/pageitemD8A.gif
From another angle, a lot of the tough drug laws came during the 1980s, when the crack epidemic led to a lot of murder and mayhem. Now crack is less popular and is delivered via cell phone and meetup rather than by crack house. As a result, drug dealers worry less about being robbed of a great portion of their wealth, which led them to arm themselves heavily in their fortresses and put forth a menacing persona. They are somewhat mellower now, though of course they are still in a dangerous business. But any politician who advocates lower sentences risks being tagged as soft on crime, never mind that the US has higher incarceration rates than any other democracy in the world.
I agree that our current system of capital punishment is a disgrace (due to the tremendous costs and probable racial bias), capital punishment in and of itself is an act of justice.
Japan and Singapore. While Singapore’s system is rather too draconian, Japan’s system of capital punishment is quite efficient IMO.
Japan executed 2 people in 2010, nobody in 2011 and 7 in 2012. The US killed 46, 43 and 43 in those years. So while the US killed 15 times as many prisoners, it has only 2.3 times the population.
Singapore apparently killed nobody during that period but given its small population, I’d rather not make this sort of comparison with only 3 years of data.
But Japan seems to be more efficient at executing the people it sentences to death. The US death row is 23 times larger.
Good, you found ONE! Capital punishment is an act of revenge to make us feel better. It is a disgrace.
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen – George Savile
That isn’t why it is done, and you know it. It is supposed to be the ultimate deterrent and a way of removing someone from the population without having to pay for their incarceration. The assumption is that particularly heinous criminals will never be rehabilitated.
You can disagree with these principles all you like (as I do), but it’s not about revenge.
I’d discuss the thread, but it’s about something different than I thought it would be. I thought it would be about that initial feeling you get that you later realize is irrational. Not things that people earnestly condone. Like, why do people feel the desire to hit someone who is annoying them? My answer to that is that anger and frustration put us into a win-lose mode. We aren’t thinking about the consequences.
I guess that could extend to more long term effects, as people can stay angry for a long while, but you’d think it would usually be figured out.
Actually two. And capital punishment is not purely out of revenge for reasons pointed out above.
It’s an allowable outlet for people’s own violent urges. And it is a projection - a way to destroy an external symbol of the parts of their own psyche they are uncomfortable with.
Same reason so many gay bashers turn out to be on the down low.