Correlation is not causation.
Canadians also eat a lot more poutine (french fries with gravy and cheese curds) than Americans. And Canada has a lower crime rate. That doesn’t mean that poutine consumption leads to lower rates of crime.
Nevertheless, I think there was once an American politician who said something to the effect of, "If I were to support rehabilitation rather than punishment of criminals, I would get voted out of office in the nest election.’
It’s true; American public opinion makes it difficult for politicians to support an approach of rehabilitation.
And back in the late 70s/early 80s when that quote started floating around I think it was true. We did have a genuine spike in crime in the United States, essentially starting in the late 1970s and then accelerating into the early 1990s. By the late 1990s through present, it had decreased quite a bit.
This spawned a lot of cultural things, one was just an absolute ton of shows on TV in this time which portrayed American cities as war zones. Special reports were aired on especially violent criminals. The mostly mythical concept of “supercriminals” was even promulgated in TV news shows in the 1980s, and thus many people adopted the belief that some teenagers were hyper violent sociopath monsters (well, I guess a very small number are) and that this trend was increasing (it wasn’t, really) and that we had to get far tougher on “weak” juvenile justice laws to deal with these nascent “supercriminals” before they got older and even more dangerous.
As much as crime actually did increase in the United States, hysteria related to it increased ten fold more than actual crime did. During this time I’d agree with the sentiments of the quotes.
I’m not convinced that’s still where the country is, but again–that relates more to non-capital punishment type laws (specifically three strikes, mandatory minimums, harsher juvenile sentencing laws or trying juveniles as adults.) Even during the hysteria I don’t remember people being frothing at the mouth for the DP.
But in the modern era, over 70% of Americans support ending mandatory minimums, three strikes laws are fairly unpopular. The harsh approach to juvenile justice is more likely to be decried than praised. Basically I think people have shifted in their beliefs, and while I don’t doubt some politicians still eschew rehabilitation for these outmoded ways of thinking, I don’t actually think that way of thinking reflects reality.
While I don’t think it’s primarily rehabilitation oriented, at the State level alternatives-to-incarceration are becoming increasingly popular due to budgetary constraints. Halfway house type arrangements where inmates are only minimally supervised and permitted to be out in public to work a job and other types of arrangements are getting more and more common in many States. While I think they actually can be a better option as it keeps people connected to the working world, I don’t think the reason for them is anything other than cost savings.
The U.S. still has the death penalty in part because stories like this make us nauseated, which happens when you bite off more than you can eschew.
Oh, and Kenneth McDuff.
A lot of that is due to the fact that the original 13 states were essentially sovereign prior to the formation of the Union, meaning that they gave up certain powers to the Federal government, but basically reserved anything else for themselves. And if the jurisdiction is that of the state (say… criminal law), the states are entirely sovereign- unless the state law runs afoul of the Constitution, the states are essentially free to do what they want. So unless there’s an amendment to the Constitution to ban capital punishment, or a Supreme Court case to show that it’s cruel and unusual punishment (something forbidden in the 8th Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights), there’s not a damn thing that the Federal government can directly do. They can always do something like they did with drinking age and BAC limits and withhold Federal funds unless the states fall into line, but there’s nothing forcing the states to comply.
This seems to be something fundamentally foreign to European observers- they come from a tradition of centralized government in kings, emperors, etc… and even though they’re all liberal democracies today, the actual power still derives from the top- for example, the UK devolved the Scottish Parliament. US states were never devolved in the same fashion- as states, they’re equal under the law, and retain all the legislative scope that the other states retained.
So the idea that the Federal government can just order the states around makes sense to a European, but not in the US.
Not in this forum, you can’t.
Personal insults are prohibited.
Do not do this again.
[ /Moderating ]
There in fact is. To believe that capital punishment actually accomplishes something useful is ridiculous. If its one unassailable positive is that it prevents a person from re-offending, then why should we publicize it? Retire the bad people quietly, with no fanfare, no families of victims observing, no spitting or invective. But that is not how we do it. We play it to the atavistic hilt, taking little or no notice of the fact that the net effect is not a positive one.
“Scores”? Let us know when there are a lot, then.
EdwinAmi, you can use the “Quote” button at the bottom right of each post if you want to quote “properly”, i.e. with the name of the person you quoted and a handy link to their post. If you want to quote multiple posts in a thread, you can click the button to the right of it to select the post (and as many others as you want) so when you click “Post Reply” all the quotations will be there for you, ready to be rebutted.
And many in other parts of the world don’t have the death penalty in part (I know myself that this isn’t my only reason) because stories like these here make us nauseated.
Then again, I try not to think about it too much. My countries won’t extradite me to the US if I am in danger of facing the death penalty, so I have nothing to worry about. I feel for those in the US, but like the attitude towards guns and healthcare, I have long since decided that I just don’t think the same way as so many over there and there’s no real point arguing about it.
That’s hilarious. I was going to cite that .pdf to you. It clearly shows that other than gang shootings, the US has a low crime rate. No one has the death penalty for pickpocketing, but we do imprison them, unlike Europe where the police can’t be bothered. The severity of punishment all rolls up from there.
So, you don’t have any of these statistics that you’re basing your argument on.
“Somebody somewhere on the Internet” has about as much weight as “a guy in the bar told me…”
Appeals to something being"obvious" is generally just a disguised way of saying “I believe that…” The public policy decision whether the state should kill someone shouldn’t be based on something being “self-obvious”.
I agree with Martin Hyde’s analysis as to why the death penalty is still used in the US. I think that some policies are more difficult to implement at a national level, and easier to do so at the local level. The death penalty is one of these. The US is unusual in that the criminal law is primarily a state matter, rather than a national matter.
Probably the closest country in Europe to us in this regard is Switzerland, as their cantons are still viewed as fully sovereign and empowered to do basically whatever where it isn’t barred by their specific canton constitutions or where it doesn’t conflict with the Federal constitution.
They had a similar situation with the DP actually, in that some cantons allowed it and others did not, until they promulgated a national criminal code to replace cantonal criminal codes in the 1940s; they’ve also rewritten their Federal constitution a few times since then and the most recent one specifically forbids it as well.
It’s also why Switzerland was I believe the last western democratic country to have full women’s suffrage. A certain number of cantons had to support it for it to enter force in Federal elections, which happened I believe in the early 1970s, but in some individual cantons women didn’t have full suffrage until the 1980s, and the final canton to allow full women’s suffrage only did so when it was required by a Swiss court ruling in 1990.
Some arguments against the death penalty use a certain kind of circular logic:
“Countries that use the death penalty are uncivilized.”
“How come?”
“Because civilized countries don’t use the death penalty.”
“But what makes those countries ‘civilized?’”
“The fact that they don’t use the death penalty.”
No. As a broad generalization, the countries (and to a limited extent, the individual US states) that don’t have the death penalty tend to be ones with more compassionate and progressive societies and in particular, more progressive social policies like universal public health care, a social safety net, and protection of women’s reproductive rights. And the latter, in my view, presents a peculiar irony: apparently human life is unalterably sacred, according to the anti-abortionists, because God and only God presides over human life. But if a judge pronounces sufficiently long legal words, then to hell with God, fry the bastard – and if it turns out to be a mistake, oh well. Oops!
I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt that this correlation exists, but the question of causation is an interesting one. I think it works both ways – the death penalty was probably abolished because those places were more socially liberal and compassionate to begin with, but I also think it’s inevitable that accepting executions as a normal part of social justice can’t help but equate justice with vengeance, lower the standards of societal decency, and demean the value of human life. The constant harping about how the bad guy “deserved it” isn’t the issue, as it’s not about the bad guy but what it says about us when we do these things, no matter how much we try to ceremonialize the execution with legal and religious mumbo-jumbo.
I’m strongly anti death penalty and strongly pro-choice, but I don’t think it takes a whole lot of thought to see the difference between a fetus and a murderer.
And, the Roman Catholic Church is consistent in its approach. Life is sacred in both cases.
My understanding is that the Church’s position is that the death penalty is not justifiable, except in societies that lack the resources to provide alternatives to the death penalty which can protect society, such as life imprisonment.
By that standard, the US does not meet the Church’s sole justification for the death penalty, since as one of the richest countries in the world,
It can provide life imprisonment without parole.
The other thing that is so stupid about this whole debate is the idea that every country has to “progress” towards the same goal at exactly the same rate. It wasn’t that long ago that the UK and France had the death penalty. Were they uncivilized at that time?
Nor does it take a lot of thought to see the difference between an actual human life and a biological organism whose status is, at least, manifestly contentious. I have no more sympathy for most of those on death row than you do, but if someone loses claim to humanity after being convicted of a murder (not necessarily even guilty of it, but that’s another matter) then where and why do you draw the line? Why not have fun with it and make the execution as painfully entertaining as possible, as primitive societies used to do, and as some still do (e.g.- stoning for adultery)? Wouldn’t that provide even better “deterrence”, not to mention entertainment?
It seems to me that what we do is hold back just enough so that we can piously claim moral absolution, but still get our vengeful satisfaction. In actual fact the death penalty supporters don’t have a moral leg to stand on. Have a look at the general culture of death penalty communities in terms of things like social services for the poor and disadvantaged. The presence of the death penalty seems to speak volumes about the community’s level of social progress and compassion. If you read the link in my previous post, it seems that not only did Texas put an innocent man to death, but it appears that he was railroaded by an appallingly corrupt judicial system.
I note your comment that you’re pro-choice and anti-death-penalty and I’m not arguing with you, I’m just making some relevant points.
Relatively speaking, less civilized than they are today, yes.
Pretty fucking tired of getting lectured about being civilized by people from countries what assraped the world for close to a thousand years. Countries what didn’t become civilized until they had plunged the world into unimaginably bloody total war twice. Oh, and racked up a can’t-sleep-at-night bodycount as their various colonies peeled off and ate themseles. European moralizing is a deeply, darkly, fucked up joke.