Atheist and the Death penalty

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I think Cerebus brings up a good point about not being able to replace years lost. After all, years and days of our lives are all we have. But also think about this, even if you are found innocent and released, there will still be a stigma. There will be people who still believe you did it, and still avoid you because they think you are a bad person. maybe by the reason of you being in prison so long and it probably having changed you for the ill.

The world is not kind or accepting of people who have been released from prison. People are not well integrated. They are shunned, and outcasts. Hell, the person might go and re-offend again because they can't live anywhere else besides prison, or all their family is dead etc.

It really isn't good either way you look at it.

Thank you for posting this. I just spent 9 years (flat!) of my life incarcerated on false charges, while the state prosecutors who were behind the conviction on shady "evidence" (and from blocking exonerating evidence by way of a trial judge who had just been elected right out of that District Attorney's office, as often happens) did everything in their power to delay and/or hamper the appellate review process. My conviction was just overturned in late January, with me actually being released in April--you'd think that an appellate victory means immediate release, but it doesn't, as the local judge still has to issue the official finding based on the Supreme Court's ruling, and order the case dismissed and the prisoner released--and even without the "felony box" check-mark on my job applications, and despite having a degree in science, I still can't explain to employers why I haven't had a job in nine years, so I wind up having to talk about my false conviction. They never believe me, as I have yet to receive a call-back from an interview, an issue I never once had, prior to imprisonment. Even the "taint" of a conviction that turned out to be wrongful does not wash off. Luckily, I have managed to self-employ in the shop of an old friend who builds custom bikes, which is now my "new career". I had a relatively easy time in prison, despite being sent to "Maximum Security" camps, because my education allowed me to take up "jailhouse lawyering", working on behalf of inmates oppressed by the system, which rendered me untouchable by the predators of various sorts in there... others are generally not so fortunate, since poverty, lack of family support, and lack of education are primary predictive factors in who is vulnerable to incarceration, and the gang leaders and other predators on the inside know how to spot and recruit or exploit those who are easily misled. The implications for society are staggering; even with my high IQ, mental toughness, family support, and strong educational background, I have myriad symptoms of PTSD that have clearly emerged since being released. I can only imagine what it is like for those without my advantages.

The damage the prison system does to everyone, the guilty and the innocent (which some estimates put as high as 1 in 10, and even the US Department of Justice estimates place at 1 in 50 wrongfully incarcerated, not even counting those who are massively over-charged by prosecutors for petty/minor crimes, as a way of ensuring a plea-negotiation through fear of more serious sentence, if they insist on going to trial and lose), is incalculably deep. It is made worse by the damage we have done to Due Process as a result of trying to "grease the wheels" on behalf of the Drug War, and the system's desire to facilitate its own operation-- in many cases, the prosecutor's chair becomes the path to higher office in state government, where most of the laws are made, so new legislation tends to adopt their peculiar mindset, with regard to laws and their enforcement. When you have a "Public Defender", the overworked free lawyers that are often just doing that job until they can get into the prosecutor's chair, you have little chance of winning at trial, and everyone knows it. Add to the corrupt political arena the money and influence of the for-profit prisons and corporations that profit from the mass incarceration of Americans, and you have a recipe for disaster... which is exactly what we have in this nation.

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A deterrent makes you not want to do something.  Dead people do not want to do something.

That quite the scorched-earth approach to changing someone's mind, don't you agree?

Heya Thump!

I believe the "theory" (I use that term loosely) behind "deterrence" is the Napoleonic "pour encourager les autres",  in that it's not supposed to be a deterrent to the particular criminal, but to others who might follow in his wake with similar wrongdoing. They believe that if we are just harsh enough  on crime, we can reach a point where others will "see what happened to that guy" and avoid behaving the same way.

Of course, this ignores that most crime is the linked to and/or the direct result of desperate poverty and/or drug addiction, at which point the person thinking of committing a crime is not thinking of what happens to others (in any sense of that term), and ignores that actual predators typically have an "it can't happen to me" mindset. We are, in effect, destroying lives based on a demonstrably false premise. Most other first world nations have already taken note of this fact, and offer sentences far less harsh than equivalent sentences in the USA, and focus more on rehabilitation of the individual rather than warehousing mass numbers.