[Crime and Punishment]
Blood Simple.
We share the dubious company of China, Iran, North Korea, Liberia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Uganda--among 68 others--of countries that execute their citizens. By my count, only two other functioning democracies, Japan and India, share this practice. There's a reason democracies don't kill their criminals, and it has nothing to do with vagaries in their justice system or uncomfortable questions about disproportionately killing off minorities. Rather, they choose to do it because killing citizens is anathema to democracy. It is the senseless and brutal act of tyrannies, and reveals the dark side of our national psychology.
Yesterday, the US killed off its thousandth citizen since state-sponsored killing was reinstated in 1977. Americans are starting to pull back on their delight in this practice--80% approved of it in the 90s--but mainly because so much evidence has come to light that innocents were likely killed. We cling to the practice not because it reduces murders (Texas, executing fully a third of the 1,000, exceeds the national average in murder), but because revenge is part of our national ethos. Whether it comes from our Puritan heritage or through a process of accretion (a little bit Puritan, a little bit Wild West, a little bit Hollywood, a little bit ...) is not clear, but the evidence that it does not serve any other purpose is obvious. It's revenge, taking blood for spilling blood, a moral equation we are overwhelmingly in favor of.
I take some comfort in the thought that we may pull back from this instinct in the face of the unsavory facts that our bloodlust has killed innocents, and disproportionately black innocents who were railroaded by racist judiciaries. But even if we do away with the death penalty, we will still have the lust for revenge. Our prisons are barely more than gulags and our system of post-incarceration punishment (labeling and tracking "sexual predators," revoking basic rights of citizenship like voting) permanently stain our criminals with scarlet letters. Our need for revenge, whether we have the death penalty or not, will find its expression. There are magnificent things about every country, and horrible dirty secrets. This is one of our worst, and it shames me to see us stand for torture and killing in front of a more grown-up world.
3 comments:
I don't often put it in such apocalyptic terms, Jeff, but I do share your distaste for the death penalty. Is it a deterrent? Nope. My theories on criminality, half-formed though they are, simply recoil at the thought that there's nothing extraordinary about someone who, in the course of a normal life, kills someone. Even if you get to environmental factors, be it extreme poverty, drug abuse, childhood abuse, molestation and so on: more people survive those experiences without coming out of the other side killing another person than don't. The capacity to kill, whether it's a total stranger, your kids or your next door neighbor, there's just something weird going on.
Anyway, good post. It's not something with which I'm comfortable either.
we talk about the capacity to kill, but only in a social sense...what about war? you can shoot all the brownies you want overseas, but the minute you come back home, you're expected to be civilzed. well, unless you join the police force, then you can continue shooting brownies unopposed.
Since we're talking executed prisoner stats, what's the make-up of minorities vs. caucasian "state murder victims"? Anyone who can read probably knows that percentage wise, there are more persons of color behind bars, but who's getting convicted of capital crimes? Perhaps a better question would be, what social class makes up the most killers? Are we most definitely as a society going after those who are more vulnerable to prosecution, i.e. people living in poverty and therefore less likely to be well defended? I'm sure I could look this stuff up, but Jeff seems to have a knack for research leading to prose, so I submit these items to him.
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