4 ms·

We don't often learn something by killing, and it is barbaric. An ironic reflection of our own lust for blood. But, okay. Sure, it is satisfying since the "bitc

by RevRal 17y ago

We don't often learn something by killing, and it is barbaric. An ironic reflection of our own lust for blood. But, okay. Sure, it is satisfying since the "bitch has it coming." Capital punishment is the easy way out for the criminal and the society that reared the criminal. If the criminal is truly guilty, they always get the last laugh. At least in my mind. We, the taxpayers, front the money to satisfy our blood-lust. And we learn nothing in the end except, for a moment, we can feel the thrill of hooting and hollering over the carcass of an enemy.

aarongough 17y ago
I actually agree with you far more that my original statement shows. That being said I just can't see how keeping someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life is in any way preferable to just killing them. They are unable to contribute to society while incarcerated, incarceration is not shown to actually help rehabilitate them, and incarceration costs everyone else a lot of money... On the other hand: if capital punishment is used then it's pretty clear they'll never get the chance to re-offend. And in cases like this where the criminal has done something truly heinous I think that is the biggest plus possible.
- dschobel 17y ago
  In cases like this you can pretty much count on a 'life without parole' sentence though. I'd say 60 pitiful years in a federal penitentiary is far more cruel than a death sentence.
  - aarongough 17y ago
    I definitely agree that it's more cruel. Also, the person being in prison doesn't guarantee that they're not going to commit any more crimes, it just guarantees that those crimes are going to be against either other inmates or prison staff. Personally I think that in cases of super-long jail time they may as well just change it to a capital sentence.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Super-long jail time is a death sentence. It's execution by incarceration.
- RevRal 17y ago
  I understand your view. The situation makes me sad, and angry, all around. And I'm not talking about just this case. I have adopted a "we are homo sapien" (note: not plural) outlook toward humanism. Ideally, for me, we can let these guys live while we slowly improve our civilized society to a point where the niche that conditions these criminals can absolutely no longer function. They slowly die out and we have no blood on our hands. I think we're still primitive, though. I acknowledge that I am very lofty and this issue is very complicated. I would just really not like to have anything to do with death.
  - hugh_ 17y ago
    I have adopted a "we are homosapien" (note: not plural) outlook towards the humanities While I have no idea what that means, I would like to point out that "homo sapien" is not the singular of "homo sapiens"
    - RevRal 17y ago
      I'm really racking my brain here thinking of a way to fix my sentence. What I'm saying is that our human power and dignity does not come from the individual but the whole species. Like a colony of ants. A sort of species mind. It is the intelligence that exists in the cloud of connections between humans. Not self aware intelligence, but an intelligence that expresses itself in culture and societies. I am basically saying that we are all of the same branch of that four dimensional tree called evolution. I believe that this oneness mindset is healthier. If you ever wondered what an off topic comment looks like, there you have it :)
  - aarongough 17y ago
    I get where you're coming from, and I would love to live in the utopia you're describing. But unfortunately I don't think that it is likely to happen any time soon...
- DanHulton 17y ago
  Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of million. You can house a criminal for quite a long time before that money's spent. Further, the current version of incarceration has been shown to not help rehabilitate, yes. I totally give you that. But the current version of incarceration was never designed to rehabilitate. It was designed to securely lock people away for a long time, and that's about it. In pursuit of that goal, we've turned our prisons into a very scary place that (IMHO) does more harm than good. This isn't to say that every version of incarceration has to be evil in that same way. What if prisons were run with the specific incentive to rehabilitate people at all costs? This really hasn't been tried except in some very limited circumstances, though largely because it's political suicide. Sure, it may very well be the best thing long-term to spend a lot of time and money making criminals stop being criminal, but try explaining this to the father who saw his daughter raped by that animal while on national TV with him while you're running for president.
  - mkramlich 17y ago
    Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc. I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.
    - RevRal 17y ago
      I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone. It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.
      - mkramlich 17y ago
        If they didn't mean that killing someone costs a lot of money then they should not have said it. :) I was simply pointing out that killing can be be done pretty quickly and cheaply -- as cheap and quick as we as a society want. The same goes for whether and how imprisonment is carried out. As with many things in life, there are dials. We can adjust these dials.
- jonny_noog 17y ago
  If capital punishment is used, there's never a chance that someone spuriously found guilty might be able to be vindicated and get some semblance of their life back. It's better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man hang. Or at least that 10 guilty men stay in jail, no? If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument. And won't that be a wonderful world to live in by the way, once the government can accurately read our thoughts. :)
  - anamax 17y ago
    > If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument. Prisons are dangerous places. Putting someone in one often results in their death. (It always does for "life without parole" sentences.) So, if it's really the death of innocents that bothers you, you can't support imprisonment either. In fact, if you're actually innocent, you probably want to get sentenced to death because that's the best way to get reasonable review. If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.
    - delackner 17y ago
      Prison is not by definition dangerous. There are plenty of societies that find a dangerous prison to be unacceptable. And then there are others that seem to take grim pleasure in the idea that someone in Prison might be harmed.
      - anamax 17y ago
        > Prison is not by definition dangerous. The prisons that you're willing to put people in are dangerous. You argued "innocents may die". Do you really want to amend that to "it's bad if innocents will necessarily die but okay if they die in practice so long as I can convince myself that they needn't die in theory"?
aarongough 17y ago
I'm not really sure why people are downmodding this. While RevRal's opinion may fly in the face of the emotions everyone is likely experiencing after reading the article, he still makes a valid point and touches on a subject that I think speaks volumes about our society in general.
baguasquirrel 17y ago
Why should good people have keep watch over these kinds of criminals? Isn't that barbaric? The time and the labor could be better spent elsewhere. Every guard we hire, every prison we build, is a hospital that couldn't be built, a teacher who couldn't be hired. I feel this is barbaric towards those in need who've done no wrong.
- tome 17y ago
  Wasn't the parent's point that it's cheaper to imprison for life than it is to execute? http://www.nyadp.org/main/faq#0 http://www.nyadp.org/main/faq#0
  - JacobAldridge 17y ago
    Interesting. I had always just assumed, obviously speciously, that executing somebody would be a lot cheaper than feeding, clothing, housing, and guarding them for 40+ years. The source isn't unbiased, of course, but it's made me want to re-check my assumptions.
    - hugh_ 17y ago
      It's largely economics of scale. The linked post says that New York State is spending vast sums of money just to house twelve inmates on death row, so obviously it would be cheaper to throw those twelve inmates into the existing prison system for life. On the other hand, if we were to execute a thousand prisoners per year then it would start to get a whole lot cheaper. For instance, I'd be in favour of executing the scrote that stole my bike.
  - baguasquirrel 17y ago
    Then fix the death penalty!
- drhodes 17y ago
  Because people aren't born criminals. Cause and effect works throughout society. These monsters didn't make themselves, everyone had a part in it.
kiba 17y ago
I never reared the criminal and have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever. Nor was I old enough to take care of someone. Nor did I encourage the kind of environment that help cause the criminal acts. Nor did I endorse the punishment of death. It is easy to use "we" to name collective responsibility, but you must also remember that behind each "we" is a group of individuals. Society does not act, move, and feel, have goals, beliefs, etc. It is a heterogeneous collection of individuals, each with their own belief system, predisposition, history, relationship, and other distinct characteristics. Society can be more understood as a force, which its sum is greater than its parts. Yet, we also know that society cannot exists without individuals. Ultimately, responsibility alway lies with the individual(s).
- aarongough 17y ago
  I do agree with you, but at the same time those individuals can influence the thoughts and actions of the greater mob by their own words and actions. I think that everyone has the responsibility to live the best life they can, and encourage others to do the same...
JabavuAdams 17y ago
This is pretty wishy-washy. I think there's a convincing case to be made that all else being equal society would be better off without certain people. The problem is that the human system that can rid us of those people will necessarily be flawed, and as other have pointed out, you can't un-kill innocents.

by RevRal 17y ago

aarongough 17y ago

I actually agree with you far more that my original statement shows. That being said I just can't see how keeping someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life is in any way preferable to just killing them. They are unable to contribute to society while incarcerated, incarceration is not shown to actually help rehabilitate them, and incarceration costs everyone else a lot of money... On the other hand: if capital punishment is used then it's pretty clear they'll never get the chance to re-offend. And in cases like this where the criminal has done something truly heinous I think that is the biggest plus possible.

dschobel 17y ago
In cases like this you can pretty much count on a 'life without parole' sentence though. I'd say 60 pitiful years in a federal penitentiary is far more cruel than a death sentence.
- aarongough 17y ago
  I definitely agree that it's more cruel. Also, the person being in prison doesn't guarantee that they're not going to commit any more crimes, it just guarantees that those crimes are going to be against either other inmates or prison staff. Personally I think that in cases of super-long jail time they may as well just change it to a capital sentence.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Super-long jail time is a death sentence. It's execution by incarceration.
RevRal 17y ago
I understand your view. The situation makes me sad, and angry, all around. And I'm not talking about just this case. I have adopted a "we are homo sapien" (note: not plural) outlook toward humanism. Ideally, for me, we can let these guys live while we slowly improve our civilized society to a point where the niche that conditions these criminals can absolutely no longer function. They slowly die out and we have no blood on our hands. I think we're still primitive, though. I acknowledge that I am very lofty and this issue is very complicated. I would just really not like to have anything to do with death.
- hugh_ 17y ago
  I have adopted a "we are homosapien" (note: not plural) outlook towards the humanities While I have no idea what that means, I would like to point out that "homo sapien" is not the singular of "homo sapiens"
  - RevRal 17y ago
    I'm really racking my brain here thinking of a way to fix my sentence. What I'm saying is that our human power and dignity does not come from the individual but the whole species. Like a colony of ants. A sort of species mind. It is the intelligence that exists in the cloud of connections between humans. Not self aware intelligence, but an intelligence that expresses itself in culture and societies. I am basically saying that we are all of the same branch of that four dimensional tree called evolution. I believe that this oneness mindset is healthier. If you ever wondered what an off topic comment looks like, there you have it :)
- aarongough 17y ago
  I get where you're coming from, and I would love to live in the utopia you're describing. But unfortunately I don't think that it is likely to happen any time soon...
DanHulton 17y ago
Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of million. You can house a criminal for quite a long time before that money's spent. Further, the current version of incarceration has been shown to not help rehabilitate, yes. I totally give you that. But the current version of incarceration was never designed to rehabilitate. It was designed to securely lock people away for a long time, and that's about it. In pursuit of that goal, we've turned our prisons into a very scary place that (IMHO) does more harm than good. This isn't to say that every version of incarceration has to be evil in that same way. What if prisons were run with the specific incentive to rehabilitate people at all costs? This really hasn't been tried except in some very limited circumstances, though largely because it's political suicide. Sure, it may very well be the best thing long-term to spend a lot of time and money making criminals stop being criminal, but try explaining this to the father who saw his daughter raped by that animal while on national TV with him while you're running for president.
- mkramlich 17y ago
  Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc. I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.
  - RevRal 17y ago
    I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone. It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.
    - mkramlich 17y ago
      If they didn't mean that killing someone costs a lot of money then they should not have said it. :) I was simply pointing out that killing can be be done pretty quickly and cheaply -- as cheap and quick as we as a society want. The same goes for whether and how imprisonment is carried out. As with many things in life, there are dials. We can adjust these dials.
jonny_noog 17y ago
If capital punishment is used, there's never a chance that someone spuriously found guilty might be able to be vindicated and get some semblance of their life back. It's better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man hang. Or at least that 10 guilty men stay in jail, no? If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument. And won't that be a wonderful world to live in by the way, once the government can accurately read our thoughts. :)
- anamax 17y ago
  > If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument. Prisons are dangerous places. Putting someone in one often results in their death. (It always does for "life without parole" sentences.) So, if it's really the death of innocents that bothers you, you can't support imprisonment either. In fact, if you're actually innocent, you probably want to get sentenced to death because that's the best way to get reasonable review. If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.
  - delackner 17y ago
    Prison is not by definition dangerous. There are plenty of societies that find a dangerous prison to be unacceptable. And then there are others that seem to take grim pleasure in the idea that someone in Prison might be harmed.
    - anamax 17y ago
      > Prison is not by definition dangerous. The prisons that you're willing to put people in are dangerous. You argued "innocents may die". Do you really want to amend that to "it's bad if innocents will necessarily die but okay if they die in practice so long as I can convince myself that they needn't die in theory"?

aarongough 17y ago

I'm not really sure why people are downmodding this. While RevRal's opinion may fly in the face of the emotions everyone is likely experiencing after reading the article, he still makes a valid point and touches on a subject that I think speaks volumes about our society in general.

baguasquirrel 17y ago

Why should good people have keep watch over these kinds of criminals? Isn't that barbaric? The time and the labor could be better spent elsewhere. Every guard we hire, every prison we build, is a hospital that couldn't be built, a teacher who couldn't be hired. I feel this is barbaric towards those in need who've done no wrong.

tome 17y ago
Wasn't the parent's point that it's cheaper to imprison for life than it is to execute? http://www.nyadp.org/main/faq#0 http://www.nyadp.org/main/faq#0
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  Interesting. I had always just assumed, obviously speciously, that executing somebody would be a lot cheaper than feeding, clothing, housing, and guarding them for 40+ years. The source isn't unbiased, of course, but it's made me want to re-check my assumptions.
  - hugh_ 17y ago
    It's largely economics of scale. The linked post says that New York State is spending vast sums of money just to house twelve inmates on death row, so obviously it would be cheaper to throw those twelve inmates into the existing prison system for life. On the other hand, if we were to execute a thousand prisoners per year then it would start to get a whole lot cheaper. For instance, I'd be in favour of executing the scrote that stole my bike.
- baguasquirrel 17y ago
  Then fix the death penalty!
drhodes 17y ago
Because people aren't born criminals. Cause and effect works throughout society. These monsters didn't make themselves, everyone had a part in it.

kiba 17y ago

I never reared the criminal and have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever. Nor was I old enough to take care of someone. Nor did I encourage the kind of environment that help cause the criminal acts. Nor did I endorse the punishment of death. It is easy to use "we" to name collective responsibility, but you must also remember that behind each "we" is a group of individuals. Society does not act, move, and feel, have goals, beliefs, etc. It is a heterogeneous collection of individuals, each with their own belief system, predisposition, history, relationship, and other distinct characteristics. Society can be more understood as a force, which its sum is greater than its parts. Yet, we also know that society cannot exists without individuals. Ultimately, responsibility alway lies with the individual(s).

aarongough 17y ago
I do agree with you, but at the same time those individuals can influence the thoughts and actions of the greater mob by their own words and actions. I think that everyone has the responsibility to live the best life they can, and encourage others to do the same...

JabavuAdams 17y ago

This is pretty wishy-washy. I think there's a convincing case to be made that all else being equal society would be better off without certain people. The problem is that the human system that can rid us of those people will necessarily be flawed, and as other have pointed out, you can't un-kill innocents.