(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Lee Berman]

>Antonio Pedro Marques: > Why think that how a society treats its prisoners 
>will filter down to how people treat each other in general and not the reverse?
 
I do think the reverse happens. Of course I think the people of a nation create
their own government. But I think the government also has an effect on the people
in a self-perpetuating cycle.
 
I suspect the USA's continued enjoyment of the death penalty may be related to its 
history of bloody revolution from England and hundreds of years of slavery. The 
similar nations of Canada and Australia and New Zealand did not have bloody revolutions 
or an entrenched culture of slavery and are decidedly more liberal and humane in prisoner treatment.
 
>I'm ready to believe a harsh penal system will result in a more violent 
>society, but not necessarily that a milder one will result in a less 
>violent one.
 
Perhaps, as an American, I am more willing to believe in the effect of executions
on willingness to murder because of the social experiment the US has provided in
this regard. Not only do states with the death penalty have higher murder rates,
but when a state legalizes the death penalty, the murder rate rises in the next
few years. When a state outlaws the death penalty the murder rate declines for a
few years. 

Of course the changes aren't giant. But they are significant and consistent enough
to draw certain conclusions.