Troy Davis

[haruhiko]

I've always been again the death penalty. Against it no matter the situation. Even leaving out my moral/political stance against the concept of any state getting to decide who lives and dies, the fact remains that

Comments

[screamingintune]

your logic is absolutely sound when it comes to why the death penalty as a system is a bad idea. I think as a sociologist who has been trained to also see the structural inequalities that exist in all our major institutions, it becomes far more troublesome than the mere fact that human beings are prone to error. The bias you mention I think is the most dangerous facet of state-sponsored murder.

Our entire penal system is completely fucked up, though, and the problem is that our society believes crime should be handled by punishment, not rehabilitation. Our society does not give a fuck about the circumstances surrounding an offender, and then ships off those convicted to what amount to basically torture camps. We will never be safer if we place offenders in a setting that will feed into all violent tendencies and require they be brought out in order to survive. And when innocent people are thrown into those situations, or nonviolent offenders thrown in, then you're actually creating more people with violent tendencies. But prison reform/abolishment of capital punishment is extremely unpopular because US society is bloodthirsty and believe hurting people is a good way to handle crime. Remember how many news stories there were hemming and hawwing over how nice Norway's prisons are after the shooting a couple months back? It was all, oh, this criminal doesn't deserve a nice place like that. Maybe he doesn't, but Norway has a lot less violent crime than we do, so clearly they're doing something right. Unfortunately I think too many Americans think like Joe Arpaio for much of anything to change.

And that's not even getting into the mess of how juvenile detention centers are horrible and dangerous and how guard routinely sexually menace and assault girls in these centers.

Fuck our justice system.