Posted on 06/16/2011 4:51:43 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
Suggest adding the whipping post to America’s system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison?
America has a prison problem. Never in the history of the world has a country locked up so many of its people. We have more prisons than China, and it has a billion more people than we do. Forty years ago America had 338,000 people behind bars. Today 2.3 million are incarcerated. We have more prisoners than soldiers. Something has gone terribly wrong.
The problem — mostly due to longer and mandatory sentences combined with an idiotic war on drugs — is so abysmal that the Supreme Court recently ordered 33,000 prisoners in California to be housed elsewhere or released. If California could simply return to its 1970 level of incarceration, the savings from its $9 billion prison budget would cut the state’s budget deficit in half. But doing so would require the release of 125,000 inmates, and not even the most progressive reformer has a plan to reduce the prison population by 85 percent.
I do: Bring back the lash. Give convicts the choice of flogging in lieu of incarceration.
Ironically, when the penitentiary was invented in post-revolutionary Philadelphia, it was designed to replace the very punishment I propose. Corporal punishment, said one early advocate of prisons, was a relic of “barbarous” British imperialism ill-suited to “a new country, simple manners, and a popular form of government.” State by state, starting with Pennsylvania in 1790 and ending with Delaware in 1972 (20 years after the last flogging), corporal punishment was struck from the criminal code.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I support very widespread use of the death penalty. I see no reason at all for anyone to be in prison for more than 5 years. If their crime is such that a 5 year sentence seems inadequate, then execute them. Repeat offenders? The clock is ticking. If you’ve spent a total of 5 years in prison, then you are on the razor’s edge: don’t commit another crime.
That seems like a rather inapt comparison.
What conclusion should be drawn if we have more prisoners than USPS letter carriers, or hairdressers, or convenience store clerks?
Perhaps we could give the baddies a "time out"???
“We have more prisons than China, and it has a billion more people than we do.”
It only costs one bullet in China and the family pays for that. Why more prisons. A punk is a punk and a bullet is the only answer, not more prisons.
Bring back the Stocks, let these offenders be
humiliated in their own communities.
A quick glance of the various “America’s Toughest Prisons” type shows on TV suggests that most offenders probabably deserve to be right where they are.
Hey Peter,
Deport illegals...all of them. Something tells me the prisons would start to empty out.
That seems like a rather inapt comparison.
The author is appealing to the arrogance of ignorance. Nearly all of the readers know nothing more than what Hollywood has told them about the world beyond their own immediate experience, so the imagination extrapolates by adding in the familiar to backfill the unknown.
Chinese prisons are not favorably comparable to US prisons; plus the Chinese have mobile execution wagons to complement their firing squad penal system. Apparently to the Chinese, they find harvesting the organs and chucking the gutted carcass into a lime pit a better alternative to lengthy resort style imprisonment.
The Chinese also don't embrace Diversity and Multi-Culturalism, and it is a historical fact that homogenous societies get along better than the Progressive Ideal found in utopias like the Balkan Peninsula. (The repercussions of Babel can't be negated by any level of Progressive "thought")
Also, the Chinese don't have the same synergy of two horrible problems that logarithmically grow when put together: Drugs and generous Welfare and Public Pensions. Because of the rampant corruption and a profoundly strong culture of entitlement and reckless hedonism, we have a Welfare State that has supported generations of deadbeats and junkies who have so much granted them that there is boundless benefits remaining that can easily be converted into hundreds of billions of dollars in recreational drugs. So instead of policing the abuse of the Welfare State so that all wealth is consumed by the drug-addled leaches, even more money is borrowed and seized from the Producers to provide long, comfortable accommodations in a Prison State.
But its just easier to advance an agenda and simply say "The US has more prisons than the Chinese" and just ignore the fact that the comparison is absurd, yet the readership is too gullible and lacking in critical thinking skills to know or care.
It basically says that the lash isn’t much of a deterrent, if criminals would rather get whipped than go to prison.
You beat me to the punch: I was going to bring up the mobile execution vans in China.
Along with those, they have a very rudimentary justice system. People are tried once; if found guilty, they are executed immediately. There is no twenty year process of endless appeals costing millions of dollars and delaying justice so long that the deterrence effect of the death penalty is diluted almost to non-existence. I don’t believe Chinese trials are very thorough, meaning that innocent people probably are executed all too often. While there is value in quick justice, it also needs to be tempered with some sort of correction mechanism for when mistakes are made.
Probably, somewhere in between our system and China’s, there is a balance.
“Rip the shirt, how cliche?”
Ditto! Because of our totally inadequate criminal injustice system there are thousands of these sub-humans who are in prison being supported by our tax dollars. They have conclusively proven that they cannot live in society. But the government hasn’t the intestinal fortitude to execute these cretins. The only justice that is achieved is when one of the sub-humans is killed by the victim during the commission of a crime. Death penalty should be expanded to many other crimes other than murder and, the execution must be carried out in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, it will never happen.
The problem — mostly due to longer and mandatory sentences combined with an idiotic war on drugs ....
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Stopped reading right there. Our out of control prison population has nothing to to with drug possession. It has everything to do with drug useage.
If our nation surrenders in the WOD, our prison populations will skyrocket by triple digit percentages.
I’d suggest penal colonies like Devil’s Island, actually.
I’m afraid your analytic skills have not been applied in sufficient depth to the effects of drug legalization. You are looking only at crime induced by the need to feed a drug habit, and scoring that statically, the way the left scores the effects of tax-cuts, without looking at dynamic effects of the policy change. It is not even clear that most crimes associated with illegal drugs are property or personal crime committed to feed habits, when there are also possession and dealing charges, crimes committed in turf-wars over distribution networks (including drive-by shootings which kill innocent disinterested parties, in addition to their targets).
The author has good reason to think a legalization regime will cut crime rates.
First, a legalization regime cuts off a revenue source to criminal gangs, thereby weakening them.
Second, even taxed to finance treatment programs and balance state budgets, legalized drugs would be cheaper than illegal drugs. Therefore a habit would be cheaper to feed, and therefore create less economic incentive to crime. Moreover, since buying and using drugs would no longer be in itself a crime, users would no longer be definitionally criminals, and therefore would have less psychological incentive toward other crime.
Third, crimes committed in turf-wars over distribution ‘rights’ among criminal gangs would be gone.
Fourth, simply by redefining trade in and possession of (even large quantities of) drugs as a non-criminal activity, the number of crimes, and thus the number of potential inmates, drops.
Put heavily armed guards on the outside of the prison walls, air drop food and other necessities to the prisoners, including small arms and ammo. As time goes by you will have to air drop fewer and fewer supplies until there is only one prisoner left.
That's my solution and I'm sticking to it.
Sounds like an interesting idea. After the conviction phase of a trial for somebody with several prior felony convictions, present the jury with the entirety of the person's criminal record (including juvenile) and let the jury decide whether to execute. In such a case (execution of persons with multiple convictions) streamline the appeals process so that the person WILL be executed within a year unless his conviction is overturned.
Let's call it the "Timothy McVeigh Process".
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