Considering i skimmed mattys comment, i decided to read it (After an msn nudge in the right direction :P)
The likes of people being banned from certain things with reference to their crime - child molesters and the internet namely should be something the prison service really needs to look into.
Yeah, not to mention that taxpayers are paying for the prisoner's comfort. We're paying for the people who kill us. Humm, is something wrong here?
While the majority of things in prison are a waste of taxpayers money, i do agree with a few of the things they offer (Food, water, electricity and education)
Could you provide a link to those studies? In the future, saying studies show with actually citing a study is a big no-no.
Actually those who're only in prison for a short time have to pay for any medicine or medical care they receive, I'm not sure if it's the same for long term prisoners or not.
If you work with them, surely you know their history? If they have a mental illness? If so, is it right to kill them? Not everyone has a mental illness deemed severe enough to ship them off to the mental hospital. Sometimes criminals don't mean to commit a crime. The death penalty doesn't give anybody the change to help them.
Psychopathy is NOT a mental illness, but rather a personality disorder. As is pedophilia. SOURCE: DSM IV-r There is a large body of research into psychopathy and attempts at treatment. HARE is a good start for background knowledge into psychopathy. Mental hospitals are NOT the place to put psychopaths, in that population they immediately begin to prey on mentally ill patients. Anyways, read Dr. Hares' book, and check out the DSM-IV and learn the difference between mental illness and psychopathy.
It costs roughly $180 000 to keep a serial killer in jail EVERY YEAR. Good use of our tax dollars?
Definition of psychopathy: mental illness: any disease of the mind; the psychological state of someone who has emotional or behavioral problems serious enough to require psychiatric intervention
And here you can find a good outlook into the economic arguments of Prison Vs Death Penalty.
In many cases the death penalty is a lot more expensive due to the ongoing trials they need to undertake to ensure one is guilty and their time spent on death row. So in turn i ask you: Good use of your tax dollars?
Actually though, although caning might be successful as a deterrent, studies show that states with the death penalty have little difference in serious crimes from those that don't. Indeed, sometimes states with the death penalty get MORE serious crimes.
This link does show that states without the death penalty have lower murder rates, if that helps.
It's hard to compare states on this because they're so culturally different from each other... maybe the higher crime rate was the cause of putting in the death penalty?
I can't imagine the system really having much of an effect on other people because these things aren't public displays. If you tell a kid that they could lose a hand if they play with fireworks the wrong way, the ramifications aren't really all that real to them until they've either experienced it or they've seen someone who blew their hand off as a kid. Yea... we put people to death, but it isn't made viewable (probably because of the same people who throw all the bureaucratic yellow tape into the trials only to exclaim at just how much court costs are for murder trials just to make the argument that we shouldn't try them but should leave them be in the first place) to the public. Considering we hardly ever put anyone to death, I can't accept that there being a death penalty in place creates more crime. I'd think that somewhere with high crime + death penalty in place where you can't publicly display the action is going to continue to have high crime.
The tattoo thing was a little excessive... I was just trying to prove a point. It was a scarlet letter parallel for molesters/rapists.
I think sex offenders should be given a chance to redeem themselves, that is not to say that any of their current punishments are to be lifted or even lightened, but they should be treated as normal people to a degree rather than discriminated against. Repeat offenders need a more permanent solution...
In many cases the death penalty is a lot more expensive due to the ongoing trials they need to undertake to ensure one is guilty and their time spent on death row. So in turn i ask you: Good use of your tax dollars?
These people also kill other people in jail... they can be a danger wherever they are. I don't even care for the deterrent of other people. What would you do? Stick them in a solitary cell for the rest of their lives with the most elaborate stuff? ...but confinement is bad D:!!! They don't deserve those luxuries, nor do they deserve their lives (if what they've done is bad enough). They're a danger to guards and the other inmates and should be put to death. I couldn't care less if anyone else knew about it or saw it... I'll settle for that person not doing it ever again. Tax dollars being better spent then they are on tons of other useless crap.
Oh... and I googled the cost of the chemicals. Everything I've seen is around 70-100 USD. ...not that expensive. ...it's just the trials that cost a lot.
if they've been convicted once, and had numerous appeals rejected there must be something telling...
Perhaps bias or bribery? I know that sort of thing is more uncommon now than it was in the past, but it can still happen.
And for that matter why do we use chemicals anyway, last I checked bullets are just as fatal, painless, and less complicated.
The brain stays aware of pain for up to 30 seconds, even if the person was decapitated. The chemicals are either a neurotoxin that numbs the nerves and relaxes the muscles causing a painless death, or makes them unconscious and causes cardiac arrest. Bullets aren't necessarily painless. If you mean by firing squad, then it's certainly not painless. If you mean by a shot to the brain stem, then the pain will be very sharp for an instant and they can't breathe, so their brain suffocates from a lack of oxygen and they black out.
And for that matter why do we use chemicals anyway, last I checked bullets are just as fatal, painless, and less complicated.
It is for the sole reason that people find an exploded skull far more barbaric than a person who has been forced to sleep and then had their heart stopped by other chemicals. I remember reading something about some guy recently who got put to death via lethal injection... apparently the guy raised an arm or something just before he flat lined and people spoke out against lethal injection because it is barbaric. ...I'd be fine with putting their head on a stump and letting an elephant smash it... The people who get this have normally brutally maliciously beat/*****/killed one or more people to even get considered for this punishment. Maintaining "civility" or whatever it is you want to call it is hardly a priority for me when you're dealing with these people.
Because then you're just keeping them alive until they die. Seems kinda retarted, right? If they're going to die in prison, might as well have it sooner than later, especially since they did something horrible to deserve a life sentence. Some actions just deserve to be punished by death. It -would- be cheaper, if not for all the bureaucracy of it.
That's the whole point of justice. American justice is almost entirely retributive, especially when it comes to more heinous crimes like **** and murder. Keeping people safe is irrelevant to the judicial process of most states. Obviously a side effect of locking them up is an appearance of safety in the populace, but that's not the purpose of American justice, or justice at all in most places. It's meant as punishment, not as a safety measure.
The brain stays aware of pain for up to 30 seconds, even if the person was decapitated. The chemicals are either a neurotoxin that numbs the nerves and relaxes the muscles causing a painless death, or makes them unconscious and causes cardiac arrest. Bullets aren't necessarily painless. If you mean by firing squad, then it's certainly not painless. If you mean by a shot to the brain stem, then the pain will be very sharp for an instant and they can't breathe, so their brain suffocates from a lack of oxygen and they black out.
No one ever claimed that death was supposed to be easy, and I'm sure that those on death row never afforded their victims the luxury of unconsciousness before death. What I meant was a the victim being shot in the head, whether by human or machine, and that's that.
Again, WHY NOT JUST USE PRISON? We do not need revenge. The point is to keep people safe. Justice is not payback.
like I said before... unless you're going to keep people away from each other they're going to kill off some of their own... and some of these people that get killed in jail committed less serious crimes and aren't even on death row. My friend's uncle was in jail for stealing stuff from people's houses (He actually called the police on himself for whatever reason... I guess his conscious got the better of him...). He had all of a month left in jail, and some fellow criminal killed him. You're saying we mix the hard core criminals w/ the lesser criminals? well if we don't we're secluding them... and that's bad. ...and to top it off, these people deserve every luxury that normal non-criminals bust their butts to afford.
These people have taken things from other people without earning them... so we remove them from the general populace and give them all that crap anyway? So we still have to pay for these people anyway and give them everything they stole to get where they're at to begin with..? makes sense to me. If they're not compliant or eligible for labor (cleaning roads or whatever else) then they stay in their 1 window, 1 toilet, 1 matress nothing else there room for the rest for the rest of their life and/or sentence. If you want recreation privileges then you work for it. Don't give me that "free" and "rights" crap... they're in jail... you've by definition already taken their freedom away.
You keep alluding to rehabilitation being the answer. yea.. b/c that actually works... oh wait.. I showed that it is highly ineffective earlier. I wonder what the stats on dead convicts vs convicts who have had everything reinstated say about which group is more likely to continue committing crimes... I'm totally fine with a second chance system... unless what they've done is just that bad.
Next thing you know... people are gonna start saying that we need to dredge up and create some tropical island paradise and use it as a means of seclusion for convicts... b/c regular people are granted "beach time"... b/c you know... everyone gets to live on a beach
Revenge is more like taking matters into your own hands and not going through the court system. Your thinking they can't hurt people in prison is just going to get more people hurt/killed.
