Depressing? Why? I may have misunderstood the article, but it sounds like some good progress to me...?
Oh, and I was totally expecting this to be about some sort of group named Capitol Punishment. Which would totally be a clever name for a group of political activists!
So... what are they suggesting we do with all the people who probably should be put to death for their crimes? These are individuals who are so heinous that society has deemed them not worth being allowed to live, so what, society should just foot the bill for them to live out the rest of their lives? "Overcrowding of jails" is an excuse, in my opinion, for not accepting that the populace has become too large, and too willing to commit crimes, and not fear any sort of reprisal for their actions.
Why, put them in a local resort for criminals, and guarantee them 3 squares, clean sheets and all the tv and internet they can watch for the rest of their lives of course. =]
I don't think cost is an issue...if I have to pay the same amount to house a child murderer as see him put to death..the choice is clear. It should be used sparingly, with the utmost scrutiny.
if you have to pay the same amount to kill someone or feed, dress, house them for the rest of their lives, then somebody has obviously fucked up with the accounting there.
If you want to know what to do with all the criminals that should be "put to death" why not look at one of the many other nations that doesn't have a death penalty. Assuming no one down there's got the logic or imagination to figure it out on their own. :P
death-sentence is as expensive as a usual life long prison (as long as you don't shoot the prisoner right after the court).
and although it might sound pathetic i might quote the bible to those who are in favor of the death sentence:
He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.
It's not up to us to judge about death or life of someone else and especially not up to us to judge if we have any better justification to kill than any other living man. Even if it looks most obvious someone has killed out of lower reasons, we should not lower our selves to the same level of acting.
What does this have to do with 3D art ? Adam shut one of my threads once because it had notting to do with 3D art and it lead to a news article and was something like this.
That article is fucking terrible. They spend a bunch of time "interpreting" and giving conclusions without going into the reasons for those interpretations and conclusions.
I don't see anything in that article that is explaining the "current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."
They very briefly state that an investigation found some problems, but it doesn't go into why these are intractable.
This is literally the only paragraph it has regarding the issues or reasoning:
"A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections."
I mean all of this shit is stuff we know but I'm not sure why they are convinced that these are impossible to overcome.
Everything else is just people saying Capital Punishment Sucks without any further explanation for why the ALI has come to this conclusion, and if I wanted to read a bunch of people putting forth opinions without any facts or reasoning I'd read...most any news source nowadays
That article is fucking terrible. They spend a bunch of time "interpreting" and giving conclusions without going into the reasons for those interpretations and conclusions.
I don't see anything in that article that is explaining the "current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."
They very briefly state that an investigation found some problems, but it doesn't go into why these are intractable.
This is literally the only paragraph it has regarding the issues or reasoning:
"A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections."
I mean all of this shit is stuff we know but I'm not sure why they are convinced that these are impossible to overcome.
Everything else is just people saying Capital Punishment Sucks without any further explanation for why the ALI has come to this conclusion, and if I wanted to read a bunch of people putting forth opinions without any facts or reasoning I'd read...most any news source nowadays
Probably to many incompatant and corrupt people running the system.
my country just gave up democracy recently in my opinion, they made religous Blasphamy illegal. and thats taking awayfrom my right of "free speech"
Probably to many incompatant and corrupt people running the system.
my country just gave up democracy recently in my opinion, they made religous Blasphamy illegal. and thats taking awayfrom my right of "free speech"
... Seriously? It's actually illegal? That's sad... what an archaic and draconian law... I can't believe that any modern country could allow such a thing to happen. I hope people are fighting it?
What's next, start public burnings of The God Delusion and God is not Great?
... Seriously? It's actually illegal? That's sad... what an archaic and draconian law... I can't believe that any modern country could allow such a thing to happen. I hope people are fighting it?
What's next, start public burnings of The God Delusion and God is not Great?
Seems like its coming to that, If this sort of stuff continues to happen I won't want to live in Ireland anymore.
There is a 25,000 euro fine for anyone who utters Blasphamy here now. written or verbal it seems, and the Irish do that alot and aswell as that all pubs have to shut at 12:00am now and if they were kept open till 3 or 4 am there would be like 200 million euros coming into the economy through alcohol taxes. and they kept raising the price of alcohol till recently, They are destroying our culture.
what are they gonna do next listen in on our conversations online and on the phone to make sure were not using blasphamy and then use it as an excuse to listen in on us all ? as silly as that sounds I wouldn't put it past them.
Reminder that the US has the highest percentage of it's population in prison than any other country, 750 out of every 100,000. There are over 200 rapes a day in US prisons. The US has privatized prisons using forced labor.
The US prison system is a monstrous machine that chews up people and spits out broken individuals that will never be able to function wholely in society again.
I honestly wish a long incarceration period in US prison system for you flaagan, you're disgusting.
So next time someone rapes and murders a child you want to do what, poop? Pat them on the head and get them counselling? They should be put in front of a firing squad.
This isn't going to go well. I hate you all. Disgusting bloodlust filled American pigs. You like nothing more than to invent violent revenge fantasies where it's ok to torture human beings.
Protection against unfair punishment was built into the fucking founding of the country, yet you have an american prison system that rivals the concentration camps for pure human suffering. Constantly finding you imprisoned innocent people, who knows how many innocents executed.
If someone commits a crime, a civilized society will try them fairly and then imprison them safely and fairly and yes when possible tries to rehabilitate them. But American is anything but a civilized society. You can't even provide healthcare to your out of prison civilians, letting them die in the gutter rather than pay an extra cent of taxes. I honestly can't wait for your shit infested country to fall even further so it can affect you privileged babies.
Educate yourself before even thinking about commenting on the US prison system. It's so broken it's possibly the most depressing thing in the world right now, because unlike the other hotbeds of human suffering, their is no excuse other than American's lust for revenge and hatred toward their fellow man.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 738 people per 100,000 behind bars (2005). There is speculation that China may have a slightly higher rate due to jailing of political dissidents, but so far just speculation.
A 2008 study found that more than 1 in 100 American adults are in prison or jail. One in every 31 adults (7.3 million) is in prison, or on parole or probation. One out every 45 whites is under some form of correctional control- and one out of every 11 blacks. 1 in 18 men and 1 in 89 women (races combined). Spending on corrections has risen by 400% in the last 20 years, outpacing all but Medicaid in growth.
The prison population has exploded in recent decades- a phenomenon known as "hyperincarceration," even though violent crime, "serious crime," and property crime has been declining:
The scope of this problem is difficult to overstate- especially because it necessarily includes things like prison gerrymandering, police militarization, mandatory minimum sentences, "tough on crime" politicians, for-profit incarceration, and all sorts of other things including guys with mansions talking about "2 Americas." This is generally known as the Prison-Industrial Complex, or as I (and others) call it- the Machine.
Here are some links to activist/outreach organizations:
It's uh.. not hard to 'not' get arrested. Don't do the crime. Meh. So many people in prison because our penalties aren't harsh enough.
Punishment is not much of a deterrent, its better to prevent criminals and crime, (aka stop ghettos and gangs from forming). Its hard to blame people for doing crimes if that's how they are raised, I know people who steal something from gas stations at almost everyone they visit.
And most people that go to jail are going to end up in jail again within a few years.
Oh look another person without a clue. None of you know even the slightest thing about the US "justice" system, because if you knew even the tiniest sliver, you'd know it was a travesty of epic proportions. I can post all day long, because the facts all point to a complete clusterfuck of epic proportions, and the rest of you are ignorant babies who have put 20 seconds of thought into "durrr, can't do the time don't do the crime" *shits self* *is a pro-US-prison polycounter*
Let's take a quick look at some correctional facilities around the country.
Starting with Louisiana:
One out of every 45 people in Louisiana is in prison. Think about that for a minute. This is the highest rate in the country (and the world) by a wide margin.
The crown jewel of the Louisiana prison system is Angola. This is one of the most backward and barbaric prisons in the world. They tell horror stories about Angola in Pelican Bay.
Angola is a former slave plantation which still maintains a massive (18,000 acres) farming operation run wholly without machinery. Inmates- overwhelmingly black- still pick cotton by hand there, along with soybeans. They work the fields with hand tools just like in the "good old days." Some of the guards there are directly descended from the slave-drivers who worked there when it was a slave plantation. Inmates also maintain a large golf course for use by the staff.
The "Angola 3" are three Black Panthers who were kept in solitary for 36 years. This is the longest time anyone has been in solitary US history as far as any surviving records indicate. This is also in violation of international treaties the US has ratified. They got let out after John Conyers visited the prison and was stunned by that fact. One of them, Robert King Wilkerson, got released from Angola after 29 years in solitary. He is now a nationally-recognized prison activist and his motto is "I'm free of Angola, but Angola will never be free of me."
Over 600 of the 5100 inmates have been in there over 25 years. 85% of them (of the 5100 not the 600) are expected to die in there due to the extreme length of prison sentences in Louisiana. Many were wrongly convicted, but due to shoddy records and shady forensics, we will never know how many. Michael Williams was 16 years old when he was wrongly convicted of rape based on one eyewitness. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Shortly after his 40th birthday- after 24 years in Angola- he was freed based on DNA testing. He received no compensation, because compensating people for wrongful conviction or imprisonment is illegal in Louisiana.
Torture is rampant at Angola, last year they finally had a hearing on the abuse, and practices such as the freezing treatment were at last exposed in open court. The freezing treatment is stripping someone naked and spraying them with water and throwing them in an unheated cement room with open windows in the winter time. They got to hear about jaws being broken if you talked back, forcing inmates to urinate and defecate on themselves (and beating those who refused until they lost control of their bodily functions). For example "one of the guards was hitting us all in the head. Said he liked the sound of the drums the drumming sound that from hitting us in the head with the stick." Medical records supported almost every allegation. The state agreed to settle without admitting liability. Some of the inmates got $7,000 settlement payments, most got nothing.
The Harris County Jail in Houston, TX is the third largest joint in the country and one of the largest in the world. Only the Rikers Island (which is actually a complex of 10 different jails) and the LA County Jail (largest on the planet) are larger. 25% of the $1.5 billion Harris County budget is law enforcement, with more than $750,000 a day spent on detainees. A shortage of guards means the jail shells out $35 million a year on overtime; some guards are topping out at $100,000 a year in total pay.
[img]http://i28.tinypic.com/10gl7a0.jpg[/timg] [timg]http://i26.tinypic.com/2n00ksh.jpg[/img]
An average of 10,000 people are held there per day, not counting another 1,100 bused 6 hours to and from Northern Louisiana each day. Some of them- up to 1,700 at some points- have to sleep on the floor because parts of it are unused due to severe staff shortages. When state inspectors come, the floor-sleepers are hidden in underground tunnels until the inspectors leave. It has operated without Texas Jail Standard Commission certification since 2004, in violation of state law.
The jail also operates in violation of federal law- the Department of Justice ruled that the poor access to health care in life-threatening situations, unnecessary use of physical force, denial of mental health care, and inattention to suicide prevention violates the U.S. Constitution.
In its "medical tank," inmates have been left in their own blood and feces for days on end (inculding pregnant women), and the tank has a tendencey to flood.
The Cook County Jail in Chicago is the largest single-site jail in the country. 100,000 people are admitted to the jail each year. Like other large county jails, it too operates in direct violation of state law and the US Constitution; with everything from inmates sleeping on the floor to sleeping inmates being injured by swarms of rats- and even unnecessary amputations. A bunch of inmates were also each awarded $200 settlement payments after suffering penis injuries from improperly performed STD tests.
[timg]http://i28.tinypic.com/bj7893.jpg[/timg]
The building itself is dilapidated, in violation of almost every applicable building code or safety regulation. After a 2007 inspection it required over 40,000 seperate work orders.
Undertrained guards, despite their brutality, have trouble actually doing their jobs there- one inmate was able to not only get a loaded pistol into the jail but from there into the courtroom simply by tucking it in to the waistband of his boxers.
DOJ found that the 8th Amendment civil rights of the inmates have been extensively and systematically violated.
Specific violations that have resulted in federal sanctions include:
1. Systematic beatings by jail guards.
2. Poor food quality.
3. Inmates forced to sleep on cell floors due to overcrowding and mismanagement (resulting in a $1,000 per inmate class action settlement).
4. Rodent infestation and injury caused to sleeping inmates by rat and mouse bites.
5. Violations of privacy during multiple invasive strip searches.
6. Failure to provide adequate medical care, including failure to dispense medications.
7. Invasive and painful mandatory tests for male STD's (resulting in a $200 per inmate class action settlement).
8. Unnecessarily long waiting time for discharge upon payment of bond, completion of sentence, or charges being dropped. Wait times are currently routinely in excess of 8 hours, nearly all of which is spent with many inmates packed into tiny cells.
Not only to they routinely fail to provide psychiatric drugs to those inmate who need them, they also forcibly inject other inmates (who DON'T need them) with unusually high doses of things like Haldol, Zyprexa, and Ativan. Misuse or overuse of Zyprexa can cause irreversible motor dysfunction. Haldol leads to severe complications in over half the people it's given to, even when properly prescribed. The drugs are prescribed over the phone without examination or proper diagnosis, which is actually a criminal offense in IL; as is forcibly injecting psychotropic drugs except under a very specific set of circumstances, none of which are met at Cook County. At least three inmates have died from overdoses of or side effects from these medications.
Riker's Island. The Rock. Adult inmates refer to the savage juvenile building as "Vietnam." Actually a penal colony of 10 separate jails, the Rock is the second-largest confinement facility in the entire world. When it comes to putting people in cages Cali is king, but the Big Apple gives it a serious run for its money with Riker's. The Rock has been a jail sine 1884, and has been overcrowded almost continuously since that time.
Most of the jails are dilapidated. They ran out of room to hold all the inmates, so there are huge prison barges anchored there to hold the overflow- one purpose-built, 2 modified British troop transports decommissioned after the Falklands War; and also two converted ferry boats (built in 1930) were used until 2003.
3 guards were handed a 58-count indictment earlier this year for running what known as "The Program." Here's how it worked: the guards took a group of Bloods and trained them how to deliver beatings while making sure injuries were hard to notice. This group was known as "the Team." The Team was responsible for handing down punishments for things the guards didn't like- one boy was beaten half to death with broom handles for taking too long on a phone call. They also went forth in search of new recruits for the Team, they would ask inmates "are you with it" or "are you down with it," if the answer was "no" or "down with what" a crushed eye socket or collapsed lung was the result. As compensation, Team members were allowed to extort whatever money, food, or toiletries they could find from nonmembers; and were allowed exclusive access to things like TV time and phone calls. Between July and October of 2008 the unit was locked down as a result of Program-related violence an average of once every three days.
Documents show that higher-ups at the jail were regularly briefed about the Program.
One 18 year old was killed by the Team.
One woman was tied up and gang-raped with a foreign object, and officials "won't talk about" how inmates managed to get into her single cell without guards noticing or putting a stop to it.
This won't be the first time Riker's will have to pay many tens of thousands of dollars as a result of guard-sanctioned violence. Previous settlements of $500K and $100K, and many more suits pending seem to indicate a pattern.
As many as 150,000 inmates were wrongfully and improperly strip-searched in violation of a 2002 court order (which itself cost the NYC taxpayers over $50M).
Oh look, another topic where sperglord american polycounters are completely clueless as to reality, yet have a strong opinion anyway.
I could post all day, but the proof is already here. I know about the system, the system is fundamentally broken in every way from the police to the judges to the laws to the prisons and parole systems, and everyone arguing otherwise is a mental 10 year old trying to interrupt while the grownups are talking.
I think its funny that the places with the strongest punishments (and highest crimrate ;i) STILL think that the problem is that they are beeing "too soft" on the criminals... Boggles the mind.
Wow Poop, That is so sad. Not much chance of rehabilitation in those places, you go in a shoplifter and end up treated worse than an animal. What sort of people do these places create?
Classic. Get caught with an uniformed monstrous opinion, but rather than be ashamed at the lack of empathy for other human beings, get mad at the person who pointed it out for not hand holding you through it.
I'm patient walking a person through proper meshflow, not how supporting a state-sanctioned torture and rape machine is disgusting.
But yeah, it's a terribly flawed system that does a lot more harm than good. Nevertheless, I have a hard time sympathizing with the more extreme criminals (murderers, rapists etc) Those wrongly convicted, or convicted due to petty crime however don't deserve such a fate.
...edited....I said don't do the crime, don't do the time and I think that some crimes shouldn't be jail able offenses. Things like personal drug issues should go to citations, fines, etc. Some issues like rape, murder, etc should have much harsher sentences in my opinion, you know right/wrong. There's a larger underlying problem but letting them all out isn't a solution either. You'd sing another tune if your mother or lover was killed by an inmate that was let out on early parole I bet. Now I wholeheartedly agree with the actual article..system is teh broke.
Anyhow, the other point in ZacD's post if your friend is stealing from a gas station every time they visit they are consciously breaking the law every time they 'choose' to do it. I'm sure they know it's wrong. If they were dying of starvation or something the like I might be able to see around it but just stealing for stealing sake is still against the law.
People usually don't want to know what goes on there, since it serves their own personal interests to have criminals locked in and have the keys thrown away.
But we're further evolved than that, and a majority of the worlds prison systems are just devolved, sadly including a supposedly well developed country such as the US.
But Ben, no matter how much facts you have, or how right you actually are, people still wont listen to you when you pour enough passion into it to make it sound like you're the person they don't want to listen to, it's sadly how things work with subjects people would rather shut their ears to.
Capital punishment is a concept that assumes it's in a world with a perfect judicial system. I like to think of when someone is arguing against the death penalty it's not for the person who did something wrong (like rape murder whatever) but they're doing it for the person who didn't do something wrong(someone wrongly accused etc.). Our judicial system is run by humans and those people have the ability to make mistakes and have agendas.
<edit> Clarifying that I don't think it's a "great idea" I think I just used the term to easily say the concept assumes the justice system is perfect. Great idea implies I think it's a great idea which i do not.
Capital punishment is a great idea in a world with a perfect judicial system. I like to think of when someone is arguing against the death penalty it's not for the person who did something wrong (like rape murder whatever) but they're doing it for the person who didn't do something wrong(someone wrongly accused etc.). Our judicial system is run by humans and those people have the ability to make mistakes and have agendas.
Even then there are plenty of people who think the state taking a person's life is always wrong, regardless of what the person did. I will gladly pay German and Icelandic taxes to support imprisoning a person for life (in a safe environment, no rape allowed), if that's what the courts determine is necessary (which they very rarely do here, because social equality breeds less criminals, and our prisons don't break human beings from functioning within society upon release). Oh and we lack the 'gun culture".
Saying I'd prefer execution because it's cheaper is pretty inhumane and disgusting in a lot of people's minds. Funny how those people come from countries with really high human development indexes, higher social mobility than the US, and less crime.
That's a good point Jordan. I think a lot of people (including myself) personalize it. When I hear about someone getting murdered, I think of my family- and I cant imagine allowing the murderer being able to live, enrich, and rehabilitate while my loved one ceased to exist. I'm not going to say that the men wrongly put to death is acceptable ,either, it's not. I not sure what the answer is.
Also: Please show me a study that shows that punishment is an effective way to change peoples behaviour. Stricter punishment has NEVER worked as a detterent against crime, while other methods have worked far better. I mean... the US penal system is one of the worst in the western world. It doesnt take an awful amount of brainpower to look at those graphs and consider the option that something is VERY wrong. I'm all with Ben on this one. Do you honestly think people will come out of jail as reformed individuals after that kind of treatment?
I'm tired of hearing "yeah, they deserve it, harder punishments!" that's just selfish and stupid, all it will do is to breed more hate and crime. Sure, you want "revenge" for crimes comitted against others, but you are fucking up society while doing it. Make an educated choice, try to see beyond your first juvenile instinct.
That's a good point Jordan. I think a lot of people (including myself) personalize it. When I hear about someone getting murdered, I think of my family- and I cant imagine allowing the murderer being able to live, enrich, and rehabilitate while my loved one ceased to exist. I'm not going to say that the men wrongly put to death is acceptable ,either, it's not. I not sure what the answer is.
Work on a society where murder is not considered as often as it is in America. The murder count in Iceland for the past decade is lower than 10. You're thinking about it backwards. How do I console my feelings of loss. Wouldn't you rather not suffer that loss at all? Revenge fulfillment is hollow at best. When you have social safety nets, class mobility, proper education, diversity, healthcare, low access to guns, and the ability to work hard and actually achieve things*, violence and murder doesn't enter into most people's minds.
*class mobility in the USA is lower than every other OECD country, tied with the UK (which acknowledges itself as a class based society)
Iceland and Germany both had their own Cultures of Madness..they got through it..I'm sure we will too.
You should check out The White Ribbon, Poop. Great German film about the Protestant oppression in Germany before WWI
I agree, man..revenge is Juvenile. But it is a whole other ballgame when you have to come to grips with that in reality. It would be a complicated emotional state to deal with. Even if it did make me less human I do not think i could come to grips with the grief it would cause if that person was allowed to live...
I'm not saying it should have any bearing on a decision to put someone to death, I just know all the rational arguments in the world would not console me..
Iceland and Germany both had their own Cultures of Madness..they got through it..I'm sure we will too.
You should check out The White Ribbon, Poop. Great German film about the Protestant oppression in Germany before WWI
Hopefully sooner or later I mean the country is only 234 years old but we should be making better strides for for better society in all areas. Capital Punishment sounds good in theory as long as it doesn't have to be used and only as a deterrent to commit crimes but yes the underlying issues still need to be taken care of, but what bothers me most is the victim mentality of so it seems is the 'victim mentality' of Americans. Everyone can make their own decisions in life and blaming ghettos, gangs, etc for your decisions and not your own personal decisions just adds to the problem.
I grew up poor, abused, etc. I've never been arrested. I stole a few times when I was a teenager but not since then. I've had family go to prison and several friends, one of them in Florida fed pen currently. Mostly it is do to poor decisions in their life and not seizing opportunities provided to them. There's usually a way out but we as humans tend to see the easy way as the best way. We could still be a great nation if we started helping each other out, instead of beating each other down.
Capital Punishment is good in theory as long as it doesn't need to be used and only as a deterrent to crime but yes the underlying issues still need to be taken care of, but what bothers me most is the victim mentality of most americans.
I think this is probably the most misunderstood point regarding capital punishment - it's a punishment, not a deterrent. Is there any truly effective deterrent for criminals? It's been proven that the death penalty does nothing to deter 'hard' criminals, so to insist on viewing it as a deterrent and criticizing it on those terms is pretty futile.
Everyone can make their own decisions in life and blaming ghettos, gangs, etc for your decisions and not your own personal decisions just adds to the problem.
Agreed. Granted, the conditions in certain prisons are atrocious, but the alternative and increasingly widespread attitude towards 'justice' that favors the criminal as opposed to the victim does nothing to better society besides erode confidence in the system because of reduced power and more lenient sentencing, and make it substantially harder for 'lesser' crimes like assault and burglary to be prosecuted with any real success.
I don't know to what extent this may apply to the United States, but it's definitely the case here in the UK.
Replies
Oh, and I was totally expecting this to be about some sort of group named Capitol Punishment. Which would totally be a clever name for a group of political activists!
Overcrowding? Legalize!
The cost to the taxpayer isn't any cheaper with death penalties. All the legal work and the back and forth.
and although it might sound pathetic i might quote the bible to those who are in favor of the death sentence:
It's not up to us to judge about death or life of someone else and especially not up to us to judge if we have any better justification to kill than any other living man. Even if it looks most obvious someone has killed out of lower reasons, we should not lower our selves to the same level of acting.
I don't see anything in that article that is explaining the "current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."
They very briefly state that an investigation found some problems, but it doesn't go into why these are intractable.
This is literally the only paragraph it has regarding the issues or reasoning:
"A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections."
I mean all of this shit is stuff we know but I'm not sure why they are convinced that these are impossible to overcome.
Everything else is just people saying Capital Punishment Sucks without any further explanation for why the ALI has come to this conclusion, and if I wanted to read a bunch of people putting forth opinions without any facts or reasoning I'd read...most any news source nowadays
Probably to many incompatant and corrupt people running the system.
my country just gave up democracy recently in my opinion, they made religous Blasphamy illegal. and thats taking awayfrom my right of "free speech"
You should start a church and have one of its "commandments" that no one should ever go to a Church on Sunday.
... Seriously? It's actually illegal? That's sad... what an archaic and draconian law... I can't believe that any modern country could allow such a thing to happen. I hope people are fighting it?
What's next, start public burnings of The God Delusion and God is not Great?
Seems like its coming to that, If this sort of stuff continues to happen I won't want to live in Ireland anymore.
Here is a link to the article:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0102/breaking22.htm
There is a 25,000 euro fine for anyone who utters Blasphamy here now. written or verbal it seems, and the Irish do that alot and aswell as that all pubs have to shut at 12:00am now and if they were kept open till 3 or 4 am there would be like 200 million euros coming into the economy through alcohol taxes. and they kept raising the price of alcohol till recently, They are destroying our culture.
what are they gonna do next listen in on our conversations online and on the phone to make sure were not using blasphamy and then use it as an excuse to listen in on us all ?
http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/local/suspect-in-new-hampshire-machete-attack-regrets-girl-survived
Bunch of insane monsters in this thread. I knew there was a reason I try not to read threads in DnD. Emotional babies.
The US judicial system is a fucking joke that should be completely dismantled.
The US prison system is a monstrous machine that chews up people and spits out broken individuals that will never be able to function wholely in society again.
I honestly wish a long incarceration period in US prison system for you flaagan, you're disgusting.
Protection against unfair punishment was built into the fucking founding of the country, yet you have an american prison system that rivals the concentration camps for pure human suffering. Constantly finding you imprisoned innocent people, who knows how many innocents executed.
If someone commits a crime, a civilized society will try them fairly and then imprison them safely and fairly and yes when possible tries to rehabilitate them. But American is anything but a civilized society. You can't even provide healthcare to your out of prison civilians, letting them die in the gutter rather than pay an extra cent of taxes. I honestly can't wait for your shit infested country to fall even further so it can affect you privileged babies.
Required watching:
[ame=
Prison Nation
Recommended
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-Prisoner-Machine-America-Profits/dp/0813338700/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259207504&sr=1-1]The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime[/ame]
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Get-Richer-Poor-Prison/dp/0205461727/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259207650&sr=1-1]The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice[/ame]
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Lockdown-America-Police-Prisons-Crisis/dp/1859843034/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259207570&sr=1-2]Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis[/ame]
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Prison-Nation-Warehousing-Americas-Poor/dp/0415935385]Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor[/ame]
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 738 people per 100,000 behind bars (2005). There is speculation that China may have a slightly higher rate due to jailing of political dissidents, but so far just speculation.
A 2008 study found that more than 1 in 100 American adults are in prison or jail. One in every 31 adults (7.3 million) is in prison, or on parole or probation. One out every 45 whites is under some form of correctional control- and one out of every 11 blacks. 1 in 18 men and 1 in 89 women (races combined). Spending on corrections has risen by 400% in the last 20 years, outpacing all but Medicaid in growth.
The prison population has exploded in recent decades- a phenomenon known as "hyperincarceration," even though violent crime, "serious crime," and property crime has been declining:
The scope of this problem is difficult to overstate- especially because it necessarily includes things like prison gerrymandering, police militarization, mandatory minimum sentences, "tough on crime" politicians, for-profit incarceration, and all sorts of other things including guys with mansions talking about "2 Americas." This is generally known as the Prison-Industrial Complex, or as I (and others) call it- the Machine.
Here are some links to activist/outreach organizations:
Prison Activist Resource Center
CURE
Justice Policy Institute
Penal Reform International
The Center for Prisoner Health & Human Rights(created by doctors who visited a prison and discovered that instead of treating inmates with HIV/AIDS they just stenciled biohazard symbols on their jumpsuits & put them in seg)
The Sentencing Project
Commission on Safety & Abuse in American Prisons
Critical Resistance
Prison Policy Initiative
Death Penalty Focus
California Prison Focus
Middle Ground(AZ prison reform)
CAADP(AZ death penalty abolition)
The rest of you, take a deep breath.
I bet if you take out the petty drug charges they'd be a lot less full.
'in before the lock'
Punishment is not much of a deterrent, its better to prevent criminals and crime, (aka stop ghettos and gangs from forming). Its hard to blame people for doing crimes if that's how they are raised, I know people who steal something from gas stations at almost everyone they visit.
And most people that go to jail are going to end up in jail again within a few years.
Starting with Louisiana:
One out of every 45 people in Louisiana is in prison. Think about that for a minute. This is the highest rate in the country (and the world) by a wide margin.
The crown jewel of the Louisiana prison system is Angola. This is one of the most backward and barbaric prisons in the world. They tell horror stories about Angola in Pelican Bay.
Angola is a former slave plantation which still maintains a massive (18,000 acres) farming operation run wholly without machinery. Inmates- overwhelmingly black- still pick cotton by hand there, along with soybeans. They work the fields with hand tools just like in the "good old days." Some of the guards there are directly descended from the slave-drivers who worked there when it was a slave plantation. Inmates also maintain a large golf course for use by the staff.
The "Angola 3" are three Black Panthers who were kept in solitary for 36 years. This is the longest time anyone has been in solitary US history as far as any surviving records indicate. This is also in violation of international treaties the US has ratified. They got let out after John Conyers visited the prison and was stunned by that fact. One of them, Robert King Wilkerson, got released from Angola after 29 years in solitary. He is now a nationally-recognized prison activist and his motto is "I'm free of Angola, but Angola will never be free of me."
Over 600 of the 5100 inmates have been in there over 25 years. 85% of them (of the 5100 not the 600) are expected to die in there due to the extreme length of prison sentences in Louisiana. Many were wrongly convicted, but due to shoddy records and shady forensics, we will never know how many. Michael Williams was 16 years old when he was wrongly convicted of rape based on one eyewitness. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Shortly after his 40th birthday- after 24 years in Angola- he was freed based on DNA testing. He received no compensation, because compensating people for wrongful conviction or imprisonment is illegal in Louisiana.
Torture is rampant at Angola, last year they finally had a hearing on the abuse, and practices such as the freezing treatment were at last exposed in open court. The freezing treatment is stripping someone naked and spraying them with water and throwing them in an unheated cement room with open windows in the winter time. They got to hear about jaws being broken if you talked back, forcing inmates to urinate and defecate on themselves (and beating those who refused until they lost control of their bodily functions). For example "one of the guards was hitting us all in the head. Said he liked the sound of the drums the drumming sound that from hitting us in the head with the stick." Medical records supported almost every allegation. The state agreed to settle without admitting liability. Some of the inmates got $7,000 settlement payments, most got nothing.
But you don't have take my word for it: http://www.counterpunch.org/flaherty01272009.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/flaherty06102008.html
The Harris County Jail in Houston, TX is the third largest joint in the country and one of the largest in the world. Only the Rikers Island (which is actually a complex of 10 different jails) and the LA County Jail (largest on the planet) are larger. 25% of the $1.5 billion Harris County budget is law enforcement, with more than $750,000 a day spent on detainees. A shortage of guards means the jail shells out $35 million a year on overtime; some guards are topping out at $100,000 a year in total pay.
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An average of 10,000 people are held there per day, not counting another 1,100 bused 6 hours to and from Northern Louisiana each day. Some of them- up to 1,700 at some points- have to sleep on the floor because parts of it are unused due to severe staff shortages. When state inspectors come, the floor-sleepers are hidden in underground tunnels until the inspectors leave. It has operated without Texas Jail Standard Commission certification since 2004, in violation of state law.
The jail also operates in violation of federal law- the Department of Justice ruled that the poor access to health care in life-threatening situations, unnecessary use of physical force, denial of mental health care, and inattention to suicide prevention violates the U.S. Constitution.
In Harris County there is an "assembly line" set up to more quickly and efficiently certify children as adults so that they can go to adult jails & prisons. With its 162 juvenile-to-adult certifications in 2007-08, Harris County alone certified 19 more juveniles as adults than in the states nine other leading counties which altogether certified just 143 juveniles as adults. In Texas the juvenile system is known as the "School-to-Prison Pipeline."
In its "medical tank," inmates have been left in their own blood and feces for days on end (inculding pregnant women), and the tank has a tendencey to flood.
The Cook County Jail in Chicago is the largest single-site jail in the country. 100,000 people are admitted to the jail each year. Like other large county jails, it too operates in direct violation of state law and the US Constitution; with everything from inmates sleeping on the floor to sleeping inmates being injured by swarms of rats- and even unnecessary amputations. A bunch of inmates were also each awarded $200 settlement payments after suffering penis injuries from improperly performed STD tests.
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The building itself is dilapidated, in violation of almost every applicable building code or safety regulation. After a 2007 inspection it required over 40,000 seperate work orders.
Undertrained guards, despite their brutality, have trouble actually doing their jobs there- one inmate was able to not only get a loaded pistol into the jail but from there into the courtroom simply by tucking it in to the waistband of his boxers.
DOJ found that the 8th Amendment civil rights of the inmates have been extensively and systematically violated.
Specific violations that have resulted in federal sanctions include:
1. Systematic beatings by jail guards.
2. Poor food quality.
3. Inmates forced to sleep on cell floors due to overcrowding and mismanagement (resulting in a $1,000 per inmate class action settlement).
4. Rodent infestation and injury caused to sleeping inmates by rat and mouse bites.
5. Violations of privacy during multiple invasive strip searches.
6. Failure to provide adequate medical care, including failure to dispense medications.
7. Invasive and painful mandatory tests for male STD's (resulting in a $200 per inmate class action settlement).
8. Unnecessarily long waiting time for discharge upon payment of bond, completion of sentence, or charges being dropped. Wait times are currently routinely in excess of 8 hours, nearly all of which is spent with many inmates packed into tiny cells.
Not only to they routinely fail to provide psychiatric drugs to those inmate who need them, they also forcibly inject other inmates (who DON'T need them) with unusually high doses of things like Haldol, Zyprexa, and Ativan. Misuse or overuse of Zyprexa can cause irreversible motor dysfunction. Haldol leads to severe complications in over half the people it's given to, even when properly prescribed. The drugs are prescribed over the phone without examination or proper diagnosis, which is actually a criminal offense in IL; as is forcibly injecting psychotropic drugs except under a very specific set of circumstances, none of which are met at Cook County. At least three inmates have died from overdoses of or side effects from these medications.
Riker's Island. The Rock. Adult inmates refer to the savage juvenile building as "Vietnam." Actually a penal colony of 10 separate jails, the Rock is the second-largest confinement facility in the entire world. When it comes to putting people in cages Cali is king, but the Big Apple gives it a serious run for its money with Riker's. The Rock has been a jail sine 1884, and has been overcrowded almost continuously since that time.
Most of the jails are dilapidated. They ran out of room to hold all the inmates, so there are huge prison barges anchored there to hold the overflow- one purpose-built, 2 modified British troop transports decommissioned after the Falklands War; and also two converted ferry boats (built in 1930) were used until 2003.
3 guards were handed a 58-count indictment earlier this year for running what known as "The Program." Here's how it worked: the guards took a group of Bloods and trained them how to deliver beatings while making sure injuries were hard to notice. This group was known as "the Team." The Team was responsible for handing down punishments for things the guards didn't like- one boy was beaten half to death with broom handles for taking too long on a phone call. They also went forth in search of new recruits for the Team, they would ask inmates "are you with it" or "are you down with it," if the answer was "no" or "down with what" a crushed eye socket or collapsed lung was the result. As compensation, Team members were allowed to extort whatever money, food, or toiletries they could find from nonmembers; and were allowed exclusive access to things like TV time and phone calls. Between July and October of 2008 the unit was locked down as a result of Program-related violence an average of once every three days.
Documents show that higher-ups at the jail were regularly briefed about the Program.
One 18 year old was killed by the Team.
One woman was tied up and gang-raped with a foreign object, and officials "won't talk about" how inmates managed to get into her single cell without guards noticing or putting a stop to it.
This won't be the first time Riker's will have to pay many tens of thousands of dollars as a result of guard-sanctioned violence. Previous settlements of $500K and $100K, and many more suits pending seem to indicate a pattern.
As many as 150,000 inmates were wrongfully and improperly strip-searched in violation of a 2002 court order (which itself cost the NYC taxpayers over $50M).
I could post all day, but the proof is already here. I know about the system, the system is fundamentally broken in every way from the police to the judges to the laws to the prisons and parole systems, and everyone arguing otherwise is a mental 10 year old trying to interrupt while the grownups are talking.
I'm patient walking a person through proper meshflow, not how supporting a state-sanctioned torture and rape machine is disgusting.
But yeah, it's a terribly flawed system that does a lot more harm than good. Nevertheless, I have a hard time sympathizing with the more extreme criminals (murderers, rapists etc) Those wrongly convicted, or convicted due to petty crime however don't deserve such a fate.
Anyhow, the other point in ZacD's post if your friend is stealing from a gas station every time they visit they are consciously breaking the law every time they 'choose' to do it. I'm sure they know it's wrong. If they were dying of starvation or something the like I might be able to see around it but just stealing for stealing sake is still against the law.
But we're further evolved than that, and a majority of the worlds prison systems are just devolved, sadly including a supposedly well developed country such as the US.
But Ben, no matter how much facts you have, or how right you actually are, people still wont listen to you when you pour enough passion into it to make it sound like you're the person they don't want to listen to, it's sadly how things work with subjects people would rather shut their ears to.
A good book on the subject.
<edit> Clarifying that I don't think it's a "great idea" I think I just used the term to easily say the concept assumes the justice system is perfect. Great idea implies I think it's a great idea which i do not.
Even then there are plenty of people who think the state taking a person's life is always wrong, regardless of what the person did. I will gladly pay German and Icelandic taxes to support imprisoning a person for life (in a safe environment, no rape allowed), if that's what the courts determine is necessary (which they very rarely do here, because social equality breeds less criminals, and our prisons don't break human beings from functioning within society upon release). Oh and we lack the 'gun culture".
Saying I'd prefer execution because it's cheaper is pretty inhumane and disgusting in a lot of people's minds. Funny how those people come from countries with really high human development indexes, higher social mobility than the US, and less crime.
I'm tired of hearing "yeah, they deserve it, harder punishments!" that's just selfish and stupid, all it will do is to breed more hate and crime. Sure, you want "revenge" for crimes comitted against others, but you are fucking up society while doing it. Make an educated choice, try to see beyond your first juvenile instinct.
Work on a society where murder is not considered as often as it is in America. The murder count in Iceland for the past decade is lower than 10. You're thinking about it backwards. How do I console my feelings of loss. Wouldn't you rather not suffer that loss at all? Revenge fulfillment is hollow at best. When you have social safety nets, class mobility, proper education, diversity, healthcare, low access to guns, and the ability to work hard and actually achieve things*, violence and murder doesn't enter into most people's minds.
*class mobility in the USA is lower than every other OECD country, tied with the UK (which acknowledges itself as a class based society)
You should check out The White Ribbon, Poop. Great German film about the Protestant oppression in Germany before WWI
I'm not saying it should have any bearing on a decision to put someone to death, I just know all the rational arguments in the world would not console me..
Hopefully sooner or later I mean the country is only 234 years old but we should be making better strides for for better society in all areas. Capital Punishment sounds good in theory as long as it doesn't have to be used and only as a deterrent to commit crimes but yes the underlying issues still need to be taken care of, but what bothers me most is the victim mentality of so it seems is the 'victim mentality' of Americans. Everyone can make their own decisions in life and blaming ghettos, gangs, etc for your decisions and not your own personal decisions just adds to the problem.
I grew up poor, abused, etc. I've never been arrested. I stole a few times when I was a teenager but not since then. I've had family go to prison and several friends, one of them in Florida fed pen currently. Mostly it is do to poor decisions in their life and not seizing opportunities provided to them. There's usually a way out but we as humans tend to see the easy way as the best way. We could still be a great nation if we started helping each other out, instead of beating each other down.
Move to Iceland, where we know how to go bankrupt properly.
I think this is probably the most misunderstood point regarding capital punishment - it's a punishment, not a deterrent. Is there any truly effective deterrent for criminals? It's been proven that the death penalty does nothing to deter 'hard' criminals, so to insist on viewing it as a deterrent and criticizing it on those terms is pretty futile.
Agreed. Granted, the conditions in certain prisons are atrocious, but the alternative and increasingly widespread attitude towards 'justice' that favors the criminal as opposed to the victim does nothing to better society besides erode confidence in the system because of reduced power and more lenient sentencing, and make it substantially harder for 'lesser' crimes like assault and burglary to be prosecuted with any real success.
I don't know to what extent this may apply to the United States, but it's definitely the case here in the UK.