Better Ways to Deal with Crime

There was a time when men like this were put on gallows in the middle of town. And if you ask me, frankly we were better off with a no-nonsense (read: no "temporary criminal insanity") trial and a speedy trip to meet the hangman. Besides the stupid, pointless, insipid and out-right made up Solem v Helm and Coker v Georgia SCOTUS rulings, there is absolutely no reason why a person convicted of theft, assault, and child abuse should still, after being arrested 226 times and serving six and a half years in prison in three separate terms of sentence should be spared a dirt nap.

The correlation between incarceration rates and crime is distinctly negative (as more criminals are thrown in jail, crime and especially the violent sort of crime go down) and, unlike many other correlations dealing with society, is indicative of causation. Crime goes down when more criminals are sent to and kept in jail because the people who commit crime are separated from society. This is because criminals (and I'm not talking about recidivist speeders or folks who stole a single stick of bubble gum when they were 6), like the choirboy in the news link, typically commit more than one type of crime and continue to commit crime in varying intensity and legal degrees for extended periods of time. A criminal sent to jail (rather than put on probation) for a property offense typically removes for a time a threat of other property offenses and, very frequently, assaults on a person. Given that the recividism rate in the US oscillates around 60 percent (and higher for such lovely people as rapists and child molesters), the wisdom of keeping criminals away from their prey such as through imprisonment (rather than a slap on the wrist probation or the absurd, abhorrent notion of parole) or execution is readily apparent. It is more than apparent that the death penalty deters crime because the recidivism rate for executed criminals surprisingly hovers around zero percent.

It is hard to describe the hatred I have for criminals. They deprive people of their hard earned property and harm people physically: they take away a little bit of their victim's future. These people have no knowledge or intuition about the requirements of living in a civilized society. They tell us through their actions that they would replace our culture of laws, self-restraint, compassion, and respect for innocence with a dog-eat-dog world bereft of morality, predictability, and individual responsibility. These people don't respect natural rights, they don't respect abstract notions such as "working for your living", they generally don't respect diddly shit. Criminals force even good people to have bad relations with each other as suspicion runs rampant, citizens fear walking the streets, and a bunker mentality takes form. Criminals have by their own volition handed in their humanity; they have broken legal and legitimate laws and thus entered into a de facto contract with those who are responsible for the law - the individuals of a society - that they will be subject to whatever punishment the law entails. Criminals choose to violate the law and do harm onto another person, thus we shouldn't have much care as to whether the punishment we give to criminals is "overkill" or non proportional. A criminal knows, somewhere in his low IQ brain (The Bell Curve) that actions carry consequences.

And that consequence, very frequently, should be death.

Those who repeatedly demonstrate to society that they refuse to accept their own humanity need not be treated as members of humanity; they need be treated like pit bulls who maul people or destroy property. Somewhere between Rome and now we have lost this simple concept: If you disregard innocence, if you disregard justice, if you disregard that transcendent thing we call morality that allows us to live with each other in peace, then you deserve to die. When a criminal is let out of jail, there is not a chance but a probability that said criminal will violate another person again. Since a criminal disavows his own humanity, shouldn't we ensure that justice is applied in such a way as to safeguard the liberty he refuses to recognize?

Maybe I'm more cold-blooded than the average person. Maybe I haven't gone and made the terrible and sinful mistake that almost everyone in our culture has made, that of confusing a sense of justice with feelings of compassion. Or maybe, just maybe, I am a representative of the good ole days... when people meant what they said, villains were vilified, and crime was something that did not as readily threaten our livelihoods, our property, and our children.