How long do death row prisoners spend in prison?
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Too long! Usually, far too long, even when a prisoner does everything possible to hasten the day. Good point.
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This isn’t about whether you would prefer to die if convicted of a heinous crime rather than go to prison. This is about the state enforcing death as a punishment in an imperfect and often racist system where people will inevitably be executed for crimes they did not commit. You are asking the state to forcibly eliminate a person’s ability to exist. So, what if you kill the wrong person? You can take back a sentence of life in prison. You can’t take back a lethal injection.
If you want to kill yourself after being sentenced to life in prison, that’s your prerogative. But don’t assume that the system is perfect enough, or that humans are so much like you, that it should be an acceptable sentence to be imposed on anyone else.
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Exactly. And that so many news outlets are describing him that way… Well, people often wonder what I mean when I point out that in the U.S., it’s a problem that white men are the people most likely not to think much about their raced and gendered status, and to think of themselves as just individuals instead. The treatment of “lone wolf” white supremacist terrorists like Roof is but another, especially stark example of how that happens. And of one way that it can be a problem.
White supremacist terrorism is the most prominent and dangerous sort of terrorism in the U.S., and yet its perpetrators are repeatedly seen not as members (however loosely affiliated) of, and acting on behalf of, specific groups, but instead as lone, “self-radicalizing” and so on individuals.
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He shoulda got a badge first.
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I’m an atheist so death has a finality to me that it may not for others. Ending a life isn’t a matter to be taken lightly and i don’t trust our government to do it in an appropriate and unbiased manner. there are far too many overzealous prosecutors and officers even among the “good ones” won’t shoot first and ask questions later.
That said cases like roof make me believe there are some instances were it is the only thing that is appropriate. He’s a sick individual with essentially no prospect of getting better. the best way i can describe how i feel about him is to call him a rabid dog. the animal didn’t ask to end up sick but now that it is and the best thing for it and everyone else is to end it’s life. not as retribution but because it’s the only humane thing to do for him and society.
twice past weeks I’ve quoted the janes addiction lyric “some people should die, that’s just unconscious knowledge” the first was referring to roof the other was in reference to Justin Ross Harris who purposely killed his son and was sexting various women as it happened.
But i still don’t trust the government to apply it. had to restate that in case anyone wondered.
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Is he radicalized or just crazy? Who radicalized Dahmer or Gacie or the Newton shooter? I don’t see Roof as much different, only he was also a racist. I guess his crazy had a focus.
At any rate, lock him up. I don’t think there is any hope of him ever being a productive citizen.
Probably worse. Being at plausible risk is one of the ways to get assigned to the “Special Housing Unit”; which sounds nicer than ‘potentially indefinite solitary confinement’ but means the same thing.
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Nothing.
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I think the definition of “The Very Worst” is itself a problem. Maybe we are drawing the lines with too fuzzy a criteria.
My own take is that if a criminal is deemed:
A. Clearly a danger to themselves and others (be those others free citizens or inmates)
B. The crime is sufficiently heinous (i.e. murder)
C. Demonstrably unable to be rehabilitated
It would acceptable to at least consider the death penalty. Although I also realize that even these criteria could be abused. At least attempt to make it pragmatic instead of punitive.
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I was talking with a friend today about Roof. She asked, on a related note, what happened with the Boston bomber, and I looked it up. As I typed it into Google, all of the suggested queries were along the lines of, “is he dead yet?” “Why isn’t he dead?”
I was reminded then and there that if the death penalty breeds that kind of bloodlust in, theoretically, people who would never murder, then I want nothing at all to do with it. People get confused about this and think it’s entirely about what the death penalty does to the perpetrator of a crime. I tend to think about what it does to everyone else.
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But that’s what you’re* doing, isn’t it?
You’re advocating and supporting a system that uses tax dollars to build and maintain houses of torment, and pays people to enforce the suffering of those interred there. That’s profoundly evil, far worse than killing people, guilty or not. Both history and our best psychological data tell us that such systems create sadists, who do not confine their proclivities to the jails. I don’t want to support any part of it. Death is not horrible, suffering is.
As I said before, fix the US prison system first, then you’ll be able to get people like myself to consider opposing the death penalty. There are other countries where the prisons aren’t like ours.
* a generic you, meaning people who are against executing convicts, not you alone.
You’d prefer the death sentence to any custodial sentence? (or at what length of sentence would you switch over?)
Not disagreeing with the need to have a prison system more like, say, Norway’s. I quite agree. First and foremost take the profit motive out of it.
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Ha. Trump, above all, cares about things that benefit him. Even if he secretly wanted to pardon this kid there’s no gain in it.
Now, if the kid were a big campaign donor. . . .
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That’s a good question, and one I hope I’ll not have to face. Tradition makes me want to say a year and a day, but I don’t really think I’d last that long in Gander Hill or Smyrna. Maybe when I was younger.
Everyone I know who has worked at or been incarcerated in Smyrna came out badly and permanently broken. And they were tougher than me.
[quote=“daneel, post:53, topic:91250”]
Not disagreeing with the need to have a prison system more like, say, Norway’s. I quite agree. First and foremost take the profit motive out of it.[/quote]
Word, I’ll fight for that. If we had a rehabilitative system, instead of one formally and explicitly based on profits and revenge, I wouldn’t see any good reason to execute convicts.
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Note that in that case the state prosecutor was trying to have him found not guilty by reason of insanity, while he was trying to be convicted!
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I wish him a long life with an early onset of clarity regarding just exactly what his actions are worth. Not exactly cruel and unusual but there is potential for the justice of knowing exactly how worthless your existence is. It’s far too easy to kill him and forget that his kind still exist.
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Lifetime sentence to volunteer work for civil rights causes?
I think I’d go with @bibliophile20’s label of “Mammonite” rather than “Christian,” because the teachings of Christ were emphatically the opposite of “you hurt us, so we’ll hurt you.” I’m not disputing that a lot of people carried out that philosophy in Jesus’s name, but I’d put the blame on those guys rather than the guy whose teachings they were completely ignoring.
As for “late capitalist,” I’m not sure what you mean. It’s a lot more expensive to go through all of the due process necessary to execute someone than it is to just imprison them for the rest of their natural life. So, if you mean “capitalist” in the sense of “getting your money’s worth,” I agree, but if you mean it in the sense of “help our friends (i.e. lawyers and prisons) make as much money off of the system as possible,” then I agree.
Again, I think that the bigger cost is in providing due process, rather than in the actual imprisonment. With the numbers that the USA are imprisoning, there should be a fantastic economy of scale.
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Yes, he was radicalized. As a white American, and with the direct help of white supremacist propaganda, he thought of himself as a member of a besieged group–white people. Without the easily Googled propaganda, he might have turned his anger in other directions (assuming he was even angry before encountering the propaganda).
Why do you too want to seem him as just another lone, crazed wolf, instead of as a symptom of a larger, terroristic pathology? You’re REALLY overlooking something major here when you equate Roof with someone like Dahmer.
“When George Zimmerman was acquitted, white nationalists in the U.S. considered that to be a win for them,” says Stephen Piggott, who tracks white supremacist groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The Council of Conservative Citizens’ website blew up. More people were going to the site, and Dylann Roof was one of those people.”
Since the Zimmerman trial, the CCC has been squarely focused on what it calls an epidemic of black-on-white crime. And when Roof Googled that phrase, he found the group’s website.
“I have never been the same since that day,” Roof wrote in a purported manifesto found online in the days after he opened fire at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C. and killed nine people. “There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.”
That moment apparently sent Roof on the road that ended in the massacre at the historic black church.
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