(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[David Stockhoff]

On 4/11/2012 8:38 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> I am not going to get too involved here, as it will no doubt veer further and further from its Wolfe origins, but the claim that the death penalty is not a deterrent from further crime ... does that imply that other systems just pay for people for life, that there is a higher percentage of unremediable repeat offenders in the death penalty countries, or that all violent crimes are just one offs that are not repeated?
>
> It seems very clear to me that if a person is prone to kill for some reason, that circumstance may come up more than once in their life.  You have already deterred future crime by either incarcerating them or killing them.  Incarceration costs money, money which we would bedgrudge the homeless who have not committed crimes.
>
> I think the ultimate detterent from repeat offenses is clearly a quick death not tied up in a too long and costly appeals system.  How can that not be a crime deterrent?  (Remember that some people in charge of the venue were executed for not enough seats at the Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and Foreman - wow!)
>
> Okay, I've said my conservative "people need to be held accountable" bit, I will run back to the Wolfe short stories now.

Since you bring it up: that argument that the death penalty is cheaper 
than incarceration was debunked ages ago. I once believed it too. But 
the long years of incarceration PLUS appeals before anyone is executed 
are far more expensive than simple incarceration---unless you kill them 
really young. And we have the Constitution ("the state shall not 
deprive...") to thank for that appeals system, which on balance is just 
as corrupt and racist as the death penalty itself but it's all the 
convicted have got. (We all wish the trial system could deliver on that 
"speedy" thing.)

Furthermore, the death penalty is almost exclusively reserved for black 
men, often regardless of their guilt or innocence, just as are most 
harsh sentences in the US (and for drug crimes, because they are 
commonly associated with black people).

Finally, in my opinion it is not the money spent housing the convicted 
or defending the accused but the money spent killing foreigners by the 
US military that deserves to be spent on the homeless---and in any case 
it's a fairly awful argument to make that we should kill criminals so we 
can house homeless men and women (in conditions equal to prison or 
worse) instead of fixing the grossly inequitable economic and social 
structures that led to the medical poverty, unemployment, addiction, and 
mental illness which caused or prolongs their homelessness in the first 
place.

The "individual accountability" bit is certainly relevant to Wolfe 
however---there is no doubt that he contains that particular piece of 
moral DNA. But things are far more unjust in the US now than they were 
50-60 years ago when he started writing.