I'd like to say that my views on the death penalty were as cut and dried as they once were. Be it pragmatic, political, philosophical, or principle -- I'm faced with a society that claims to value life and freedom, yet frequently fails to live up to that promise. Am I supposed to take a stand on principle that my society cannot or will not do?
Comments on yesterday's diary (wonder of wonders, I got a few!) got me thinking more on the subject.
Taking at least one of those comments to heart. Dropping a couple of links with some of the details. But to shorten a long story, Shawna Forde is a AZ story, local for me, about a now-convicted murderer who split off from the Minutemen-type 'patriot' organizations as not radical enough for her taste, and ended up slaughtering a family. She'd hoped, supposedly, to fund her splinter org through stealing from drug smugglers. Now she has been sentenced to death.
Some of the comments summed up the positions I expected to see. Some people may not like the death penalty, but there's room for a particularly heinous exception. It is difficult to argue against such poster boys for capital punishment; I've seen the names dragged out. Probably starting with Timothy McVeigh. The poster boys are the ones caught dead to rights. No room, really, for any uncertainty. Crimes sufficient to merit the punishment by law. Crimes nasty enough to make anyone shudder.
And the principled stand, defending our sense of humanity. Pointing out the possibility of a mistake. The degree of certainty that some mistakes have been made, i.e. innocent folks put to death, is fairly high. Enough that some governors decreed moratoria .
Or the pragmatic objection, the money-based objection. Millions spent on appeals trying to achieve a supposedly cheap execution. Or the deterrence objection -- justice delayed so long becoming less and less meaningful as a deterrent. And yet we have to delay, because of the chances of making a mistake.
Going beyond that, I find the principled stand in LWOP, life without parole -- when it's presented as an alternative, many other people would go with it, too. Enough that I find pro-death penalty advocates often try to keep it off the table, a rather unprincipled stand. It makes sense to me when considering how our justice system seems to work. Not only is there a notion of a punishment that fits the crime, but a priority system when it comes to the rights society will take away. Life, liberty, property. We'll take property, when the crime is minor. Right down to a speeding ticket. We'll take liberty, certainly, when it's called for; society decides what crimes are worth taking away a criminal's rights, when they have surrendered their liberties by not living up to what polite society demands. From probation to community service to prison, we take it in degrees as needed.
And we'll take life. When called for, when other lives are in the bargain -- self-defense, the health of the mother -- seemingly easy decisions, not quite as easy these days, but still. And at one time, executing some criminals was called for. When the justice and prison systems were inadequate to contain some people. When society couldn't be kept safe from them.
Our prisons aren't completely secure. But they seem secure enough. Enough that escaped murderers don't tend to dominate the news cycle, enough that we don't seem to consider it a serious danger. Enough that we don't seem to need to kill them to protect ourselves.
At the same time, there's that principled defense of our humanity. As much as society seems to favor LWOP, there is also the desire to imprison so many people. To lock everyone up and throw away the key. I have never found it unpopular, to be tough on crime. To cut costs, as well; to the point that prison overcrowding has become a fact of life. This source is rather dated, but I haven't heard anything more recently to suggest otherwise...
Although local jails are generally operating under their stated capacities, all state and federal prisons are overcrowded -- some as much as 33 percent higher than their official capacities.
A more recent document mentions the problem in California, where, in 2009, they were ordered to cut their prison population by about 30%. In spite of how the 'tough on crime' types like to portray it, prison seems not so much a place of idle comfort, or even a place of confinement and rehabilitation, but of privation, suffering and violence.
If society deems it the principled stand to keep criminals alive but imprisoned, because we can be safe and contain them, then it seems as if we have to do so humanely. If such prisoners are kept alive out of some sense of preserving our humanity, what good does it do us -- or them -- if the life we sustain is one of suffering? Torture, even?
After all, it was roundly condemned as torture during the Bush regime. Not that Obama gets a free pass; the Bradley Manning case has come up, even here .
So this is, to some degree, by some, considered torture. And yet one of my commenters yesterday, objecting to capital punishment for many good reasons, immediately brought up solitary confinement for Shawna Forde for her own safety.
So we can kill her, but at some cost (ineffable humanity) and with some risk (the irreversible mistake). Or we can imprison her, although that too might be at some cost (ineffable humanity again) and at some risk (escape). We might accept and try to manage the risk of escape, although as I mentioned yesterday and again here, sometimes society is too cheap to manage it properly.
At the end of all this, I'm left with the sense that the society I live in has these marvelous principles that it generally just doesn't live up to. And the principled stand on humanity itself, whatever that means, does not do justice to the death penalty argument. Not when the proposed alternative really isn't as humane as it appears at first glance. It would be principled -- if we had prisons that treated the people inside them like human beings. What would it take to make them that way? Less people in prison? Less severe sentencing? More funding for prisons? Building more of them?
Does anyone think any of that will actually happen? And if not, what is the principled stand? Well, I don't have an answer. The answer based on society's behavior, I don't seem to like. Maybe that's why we don't talk about this stuff. Better to argue about...principle.
(2/23 edit) Rescued? Spotlight? Bright light, eek! heh. Just wanted to thank the folks who participated in the discussion here and those who facilitated it by giving my diary some attention. Some interesting comments to research and follow up on.