White Supremacist Executed For Texas Dragging

[Broomstick]

I simply do not believe that human dignity is compatible with permanent confinement

I have long found this stance of yours to be intriguing, and it has prompted me to think about the matter at length.

While I don't think permanent confinement is a good thing, in this circumstance it would only be applied to the most dangerous of people. Ideally, it would be a situation where the safety of many depends upon the confinement of one, and would not be done lightly.

Ideally, I'd also like that confinement to be as humane as possible. That would mean comfortable (even if spartan) accommodations, a reasonable amount of space for both living room and exercise, and a means of passing the time. If such person demonstrates good conduct within prison they could be permitted contact with other prisoners. Certainly, there should be reading materials, books on tape, music, and the like available. How much contact with the outside world, and in what manner that would take place, would depend in part upon the prisoner.

If, however, the person can not behave within the boundaries of such confinement, if they start doing things like plotting crimes within prison, harming others, and so forth we will have no choice but to restrict them even further.

The ultimate, of course, is solitary confinement. Now, while for normal people this is not a good thing, the case of Charles Harrelson has made me question if it is ALWAYS a bad thing. He spent the last 12 years of his life in Supermax prison, and he said "there are not enough hours in a day for my needs as a matter of fact... The silence is wonderful". He liked being alone. It may be there are some people for whom this is not torture but a tolerable state of being - perhaps those like Harrelson who really, really don't care much for other human beings.

That said, even if in some cases permanent solitary or near-solitary confinement is justified and/or tolerable, I would want it to be a very rare punishment. These would have to truly be "rabid animals", people who can not be rehabilitated, and who are too dangerous to keep under normal prison conditions. Even then, I assume someone like Harrelson had some way to pass the time. Even if a person isn't permitted direct human contact with others (except with prison personnel when absolutely necessary) that doesn't rule out letting them have something to occupy their time. There's a difference between confinement with literally nothing to do but start at the walls and confinement where you have something to occupy your mind and/or body.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Broomstick, my stance is based on the fact that numerous studies have shown that sustained deprivation of regular contact with other humans causes psychosis, and is therefore torture. If we waterboarded a masochist who got off on it at Abu Ghraib, would it still be torture? Someone who appreciates solitary confinement is arguably insane; the human psyche is not designed, biologically, for humans to function mentally outside of groups and group social bonds. I am saying that unless it's okay for the government to torture people who like being tortured, it probably isn't okay to put people in solitary confinement who like the solitude, as both behaviours are so far outside of the human norm that the people doing it would still necessarily have to be bankrupting themselves ethically. I can cite the studies later but it seems in particular the life imprisonment and solitary confinement are functionally worse than death sentences for a mentally normal human being, and I would treat someone who actively sought them as being mentally ill.

I also however consider the potentially hours-long process of setting up a person for execution and carrying it out by lethal injection when they are strapped into place, with medical procedures that are not supervised by ethical doctors, to be likewise tortuous and contrary to human dignity, that the medical process of successive injections and paralyzation drugs (which serve no purpose in the execution except to clinicize it for the executors) to be exquisitely inethical, thus, why I believe guillotining and firing squad to be better; a few seconds of intense pain followed by black being fundamentally less psychologically tortuous than repetitive injection, finding veins, IV insertion, minutes or in a few cases in Texas hours of agony and psychological torture. I see the clinicalization of the death penalty as being its undoing; I cannot sanction the death of anyone by lethal injection, especially since cooperation in meeting one's fate is rendered impossible.

[ThomasP]

There is a class of arguments on this issue (not just executions, but also on length of prison sentences), which I'm going to call "the punitive argument." Most of them take the form: "We should punish this crime very harshly so that people will be intimidated into not doing it."

This is the retributive justice argument, and it has two points of view. One is the deterrence angle, which you note here, with a slant towards preventing crimes. The other is punishment-as-justice, where you "right" the wrongdoing in an Old Testament eye for an eye sense.

Deterrence works in some cases, so long as the punishment is certain, swift, and appropriate to the crime. For some cases—and some people—this works just fine. For others, both crimes and people, the punishment may not feel certain or swift at all. The death penalty, being as removed as it is, has a way of becoming an abstraction that has no real bearing on the decisions being made right now. You could argue the same for life imprisonment.

A lot of our criminal justice principles derive from 18th and 19th century thinkers, names like Beccaria and Bentham and such, and are based on classical ideas of free will and rational choice. It makes perfect sense to use deterrence for crimes where rational choice factors in. But with the emerging view of neuroscience and psychology it's easily argued that crimes like murder, and especially a racially-motivated murder as in this case, have little if any involvement of "rational" thought processes.

In any population, you'll have some percentage of people who are biologically inclined not to respond to deterrence simply because their impulse control is impaired (clinical psychopaths) or because they have overactive sensation-seeking impulses (Zuckerman's sensation seekers). The concept of being caught and punished doesn't even enter the equation at the time of the offense, even if they are explicitly aware of it. They can "know" and still not respond to it. This isn't to absolve the criminals of responsibility for their actions, mind you, but it does call into question the notion that you can stick the threat of punishment out there on a billboard and have it factor in to those actions.

There's definitely some merit to the punishment-as-justice argument in truly horrible crimes, although I think even that has social consequences of greater value than retribution for the sake of retribution. Keeping a serial killer off the street would be an extreme but clear instance.

[Thanas]

Broomstick, my stance is based on the fact that numerous studies have shown that sustained deprivation of regular contact with other humans causes psychosis, and is therefore torture.

That sounds more like a criticism of the conditions in US prisons than of lifelong confinement in itself. Would you also say this about the EU programs of life sentences?

[Broomstick]

Broomstick, my stance is based on the fact that numerous studies have shown that sustained deprivation of regular contact with other humans causes psychosis, and is therefore torture. If we waterboarded a masochist who got off on it at Abu Ghraib, would it still be torture? Someone who appreciates solitary confinement is arguably insane; the human psyche is not designed, biologically, for humans to function mentally outside of groups and group social bonds.

However, if we do have someone who is so dysfunctional mentally as to be a danger to others, and who also, as a consequence of that, does NOT find near-solitary confinement to be torture but actually in some manner calming/soothing/otherwise not unpleasant then, absent a means of curing them, solitary confinement might be the least evil in their case.

Normally, limiting a person's diet to just the same thing over and over is seen as unreasonable, but if someone suffered from an incurable medical condition that meant they could only eat one sort of food without getting sick then far from being a cruelty feeding them on just that would, in fact, be the proper course of action.

I don't find it comparable to waterboarding a masochist. For one thing, waterboarding is active and done to be unpleasant to the point of torture and coercion. While solitary confinement can be that, that doesn't have to be the prime concern. For another example, if a prisoner is disabled or weak and is actively afraid of abuse from other prisoners that person might prefer loneliness to constant abuse and fear of abuse. Someone like Harrelson is, unquestionably, damaged, but if he found solitary confinement more tolerable than having to actually deal with people then arguably in that particular case it would be a cruelty to force him to interact with others any more than necessary.

In actual fact, Harrelson's isolation wasn't total. He was permitted some visits by family, for example. It's just that most of the time he didn't have anything to do with other human beings. That's why it may be more accurate to call it "near-solitary" rather than truly solitary confinement. Perhaps he had less need than normal for human contact so rare, intermittent interaction was all that he needed.

No, it's not good for normal people, but the people such a punishment would be applied to in an ideal system wouldn't exactly be normal. That doesn't mean all would find it tolerable - some might, in fact, tolerate it WORSE than normal people - but if a person is sufficiently dangerous it may come down to the good a many others vs. the good of one.

There may be some situations in which a person couldn't really be confined securely or humanely - in which case death might be the preferable outcome. For example, if a serial killer escaped prison, someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, I wouldn't be too concerned with bringing him back alive, just with stopping him from harming someone else. I suppose that's a death penalty of a sort.

I am saying that unless it's okay for the government to torture people who like being tortured, it probably isn't okay to put people in solitary confinement who like the solitude, as both behaviours are so far outside of the human norm that the people doing it would still necessarily have to be bankrupting themselves ethically. I can cite the studies later but it seems in particular the life imprisonment and solitary confinement are functionally worse than death sentences for a mentally normal human being, and I would treat someone who actively sought them as being mentally ill.

The thing is, human history records many people who voluntarily sought solitude/confinement. It may not be a normal human condition, but it may not be incompatible with life, either.

I also however consider the potentially hours-long process of setting up a person for execution and carrying it out by lethal injection when they are strapped into place, with medical procedures that are not supervised by ethical doctors, to be likewise tortuous and contrary to human dignity, that the medical process of successive injections and paralyzation drugs (which serve no purpose in the execution except to clinicize it for the executors) to be exquisitely inethical, thus, why I believe guillotining and firing squad to be better; a few seconds of intense pain followed by black being fundamentally less psychologically tortuous than repetitive injection, finding veins, IV insertion, minutes or in a few cases in Texas hours of agony and psychological torture. I see the clinicalization of the death penalty as being its undoing; I cannot sanction the death of anyone by lethal injection, especially since cooperation in meeting one's fate is rendered impossible.

Except that firing squad and/or guillotine would never be that quick and simple in the US. Carrying out a death sentence is quite ritualized (that's true of most cultures, not just the US). Any execution is proceeded by hours of ritual and procedure during which the condemned can suffer. It may start as early as the night before with a last meal.

I really don't understand why we need a three-part cocktail for lethal injection - simply administer a massive overdose of any anesthetic. Much simpler.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Broomstick, my stance is based on the fact that numerous studies have shown that sustained deprivation of regular contact with other humans causes psychosis, and is therefore torture.

That sounds more like a criticism of the conditions in US prisons than of lifelong confinement in itself. Would you also say this about the EU programs of life sentences?

They would still at the very least require the death penalty as a reserve alternative for those who murder in prison to be truly humane, as social camraderie and connection is a necessary part of healthy human mental functioning. What do you do with convicts who murder, presently? I imagine it has to end up something like US solitary confinement out of necessity of protecting the other prisoners, which still leaves it being unethical and contrary to human dignity.

[Broomstick]

Broomstick, my stance is based on the fact that numerous studies have shown that sustained deprivation of regular contact with other humans causes psychosis, and is therefore torture.

That sounds more like a criticism of the conditions in US prisons than of lifelong confinement in itself. Would you also say this about the EU programs of life sentences?

It also presupposes an absolute form of solitary confinement and isolation. In most cases even prisoners requiring "special handling" are not completely cut off. Protective custody units, for example, isolate prisoners from the general population but may allow prisoners within the unit to associate with each other. Even most prisoners in high security situations are allowed family and lawyer contact.

Harrelson was really one of the worst - he was a killer-for-hire who attempted to escape multiple times. He really was fucking dangerous and bad. If keeping him in isolation calmed him down and cut down on his attempted escapes it was well worth it - but even his isolation wasn't total, and certainly other, less restrictive environments were attempted first.

Absolutely locking someone in a bare cell 24/7 with no contact and no mental stimulation is torture - but that's not how the typical US prisoner is confined, and even those in special security units aren't subject to such extreme conditions. Jeffry Dahmer - a charming guy who used to drug men, rape them, lobotomize them, kill them, and eat them (not always in that exact order) - was originally put into isolation for his own safety (because who the hell would want to be his cellmate, right?). He appealed that decision, told a judge he realized that more contact with others carried a risk of death, and was granted more time out of his cell and a job within the prison. And he was murdered by another prisoner. Well, in that case I don't really object to how things played out - Dahmer made his choice. On the other hand, Dahmer was always a very cooperative prisoner so he wasn't a discipline problem or an escape threat. That's very different than Harrelson, even if Dahmer killed more people and actively tortured them, which Harrelson didn't.

In other words, criminals aren't identical. Sometimes, housing dangerous people gets complicated. What is torture to one is actually welcomed by another. Wow, different people are different.

But really, the stereotype of US prisons as pound-in-the-ass hellholes doesn't entirely reflect reality.

I would certainly argue the least restrictive environment to ensure the safety of society and the prisoner is the way to go, but there may well be some people so very dangerous we have little or no choice.

[Thanas]

They would still at the very least require the death penalty as a reserve alternative for those who murder in prison to be truly humane, as social camraderie and connection is a necessary part of healthy human mental functioning. What do you do with convicts who murder, presently? I imagine it has to end up something like US solitary confinement out of necessity of protecting the other prisoners, which still leaves it being unethical and contrary to human dignity.

Not really. You get them therapy or the Sicherheitsverwahrung, which can take many forms. Solitary confinement on a permanent basis is illegal.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

Sorry, not trying to threadjack, hope the mods will bear with me. Well, I think it can easily be shown there are far too many people rotting in the clink in the US for no discernible crime. That is unacceptable. At least I would hope it would be for most ethical people. The prison system as it exists now is atrocious, to say the least. For those that may not have read it/heard of it,, there was the Stanford Prison Experiment:

http://www.prisonexp.org/

A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University

Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment web site, which features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of human nature.

--Philip G. Zimbardo

Prison should really be reserved for the most heinous of crimes: murder, rape et al. We should not be tossing non-violent drug offenders in prison, among others.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That Zimbardo study is bollocks. It really was over the top and unscientific (read - Zimbardo played a key role in the experiemnt by posing as the prison warden).

[BrooklynRedLeg]

That Zimbardo study is bollocks. It really was over the top and unscientific (read - Zimbardo played a key role in the experiemnt by posing as the prison warden).

I'm sure it didn't meet the Popper definition of Falsifiability. However, whether that reduces it as a lesson is open to debate.

[fgalkin]

I don't even believe in life without parole except in the most extreme cases as I don't see why we'd need to keep frail people in their 70's in prison. I'm more of a 30 to life person.

Would you prefer they are set free without a home, without money, without benefits, without a Social Security income? What will they do outside? Starve on the streets?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Xon]

That Zimbardo study is bollocks. It really was over the top and unscientific (read - Zimbardo played a key role in the experiemnt by posing as the prison warden).

The Milgram experiment and the BBC recreation of the Stanford Prison Experiment means the original Zimbardo study still tells us some significantly important things about human psychology.

[fgalkin]

The Zimbardo study is bullshit.

Firstly, there were problems with the selection. By relying on volunteers who answered an ad to take part in a study of power relationships in prison, they let the subjects self-select.

What suspects had done was to answer a local newspaper ad calling for volunteers in a study of the psychological effects of prison life. We wanted to see what the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. To do this, we decided to set up a simulated prison and then carefully note the effects of this institution on the behavior of all those within its walls

One of the biggest claims of the study is that, apparently, the guards just became sadistic for no reason other than power corrupts

This is what one of our guards looked like. All guards were dressed in identical uniforms of khaki, and they carried a whistle around their neck and a billy club borrowed from the police. Guards also wore special sun-glasses, an idea I borrowed from the movie Cool Hand Luke. Mirror sunglasses prevented anyone from seeing their eyes or reading their emotions, and thus helped to further promote their anonymity. We were, of course, studying not only the prisoners but also the guards, who found themselves in a new power-laden role.

Oh wait, they were dressed up like characters from a well-known movie. If you dressed them up in SS uniforms, and the prisoners like concentration camp inmates, would you still claim it was a somehow natural reaction?

There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were "good guys" who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior. The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured our authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners.

So, despite being told (indirectly) that they were expected to abuse the prisoners, only a third did so. The remaining 2/3s didn't.

If anything, the Zimbardo study proved the exact opposite of what it was claimed to do.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Flagg]

I don't even believe in life without parole except in the most extreme cases as I don't see why we'd need to keep frail people in their 70's in prison. I'm more of a 30 to life person.

Would you prefer they are set free without a home, without money, without benefits, without a Social Security income? What will they do outside? Starve on the streets?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

They would still get SSI benefits, and group homes or nursing homes to live in.

EDIT: Also, IIRC if you don't have a place to live/ employment or looking for employment you don't get paroled or have it rescinded, so your argument has no weight.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah but does it actually work? Norway for example has I believe a 21 year limit for sentencing with 30 for a crime against humanity and would anyone say they're less safe for it?

Again, I think it's not just about safety, it's about making a public commitment that there are 'ordinary' crimes and then there are unforgivable ones. That no, it is not OK for Anders Breivik to get out of jail in 21 years after what he did, to take a high profile, recent, Norwegian example. That something like that is simply not within the bounds of what "our people" do.

This is the retributive justice argument, and it has two points of view. One is the deterrence angle, which you note here, with a slant towards preventing crimes. The other is punishment-as-justice, where you "right" the wrongdoing in an Old Testament eye for an eye sense.

...not quite.

It's more subtle than that, I think: the idea that there is a class of exceptionally heinous people such that we define ourselves partly in terms of not being like them. I think there is a legitimate social role for the idea of crimes great enough to exclude an individual from the body politic, for the sake of promoting a public morality which rejects those crimes.

Arguably this should be applied not just to mass murderers, but also to people who manage to cause nation-scale harm- if you can find the malefactors behind a big enough economic crisis, putting them in prison for life might be far from the worst way to establish for the record that your society is committed to ensuring that the public good isn't overruled by merchant princes.

And this isn't limited to deterrence. For example, a nation with a custom of tyrannicide is protected not just against bold, ruthless people who might want to become a tyrant, but also weaves that into the traditions of the state- that arbitrary power is bad, that it is right to punish people for seeking it out, that the state will not bow to foreign tyrants any more than domestic ones.

It's the kind of insight that, well. I would call it conservatism, but it's not recognizable as the 21st century American right, or for that matter the global 'right wing.' I think there's a reason to have irrecoverable punishments for severe crimes, although I'm happier if we have a punishment we can undo should the accused turn out to be innocent later.

It's not just to scare people straight, it's to define civil society and the state in opposition to the sort of people who do such things- which is all the better reason to do it to people who commit hate crimes.

A lot of our criminal justice principles derive from 18th and 19th century thinkers, names like Beccaria and Bentham and such, and are based on classical ideas of free will and rational choice. It makes perfect sense to use deterrence for crimes where rational choice factors in. But with the emerging view of neuroscience and psychology it's easily argued that crimes like murder, and especially a racially-motivated murder as in this case, have little if any involvement of "rational" thought processes.

In any population, you'll have some percentage of people who are biologically inclined not to respond to deterrence simply because their impulse control is impaired (clinical psychopaths) or because they have overactive sensation-seeking impulses (Zuckerman's sensation seekers). The concept of being caught and punished doesn't even enter the equation at the time of the offense, even if they are explicitly aware of it...

I don't care if they're afraid of being punished. I'm for punishing them for the salutary effect on everyone else- and not in the "ooh we get to watch people be punished sense," either.

At some point, it's not just about individuals anymore, it's about societies.

Broomstick, my stance is based on the fact that numerous studies have shown that sustained deprivation of regular contact with other humans causes psychosis, and is therefore torture.

That sounds more like a criticism of the conditions in US prisons than of lifelong confinement in itself. Would you also say this about the EU programs of life sentences?

Her objections are to solitary confinement in particular, not lifelong confinement.

Except that firing squad and/or guillotine would never be that quick and simple in the US. Carrying out a death sentence is quite ritualized (that's true of most cultures, not just the US). Any execution is proceeded by hours of ritual and procedure during which the condemned can suffer. It may start as early as the night before with a last meal.

I really don't understand why we need a three-part cocktail for lethal injection - simply administer a massive overdose of any anesthetic. Much simpler.

Unfortunately, they don't do it that for some reason- they strap you to a gurney and roll you around and hunt for veins and so on.

I think I see her argument- it's not just that there's so much ritual and protocol around executions, it's that the final phase of the ritual involves being tied up, manhandled, tied down, examined medically, forced to wait for long periods, and so on. You want to minimize that as much as possible, to reduce the period during which the body is experiencing physical sensations of stress and fear and "oh shit I'm going to die" on top of the existing mental sensation of "oh shit I'm going to die."

[ThomasP]

This is the retributive justice argument, and it has two points of view. One is the deterrence angle, which you note here, with a slant towards preventing crimes. The other is punishment-as-justice, where you "right" the wrongdoing in an Old Testament eye for an eye sense.

...not quite.

It's more subtle than that, I think: the idea that there is a class of exceptionally heinous people such that we define ourselves partly in terms of not being like them. I think there is a legitimate social role for the idea of crimes great enough to exclude an individual from the body politic, for the sake of promoting a public morality which rejects those crimes.

Of course it's more subtle than that. Retributive justice exists precisely because that common set of norms or "morality" is already in place; the behavior wouldn't be defined as crime or socially deviant, and in need of "example making", if it didn't. In speaking of retributive justice it's understood that you're dealing with behaviors that "we don't do".

And this isn't limited to deterrence. For example, a nation with a custom of tyrannicide is protected not just against bold, ruthless people who might want to become a tyrant, but also weaves that into the traditions of the state- that arbitrary power is bad, that it is right to punish people for seeking it out, that the state will not bow to foreign tyrants any more than domestic ones.

You're still speaking of deterrence, only framed in general terms instead of individual-specific terms.

It's not just to scare people straight, it's to define civil society and the state in opposition to the sort of people who do such things- which is all the better reason to do it to people who commit hate crimes.

I don't care if they're afraid of being punished. I'm for punishing them for the salutary effect on everyone else- and not in the "ooh we get to watch people be punished sense," either.

Strain theory, in the vein of Durkheim's or Merton's anomie, suggests that this approach clearly works as norm enforcement for some segment of society, but it also brings the unfortunate consequence of alienating those who don't feel they have any stake in that society. You wind up placating the stakeholders and alienating the people who don't share those feelings of legitimacy -- which, ironically enough, leads to more crime and less trust in the existing values.

The social benefits of punishment for the sake of punishment are hazy at best, certainly too hazy for the overly simplistic idea that punishment leads to net benefit in the form of reinforced social norms and values. I won't argue that it's appropriate in some cases, but it needs to have a utility beyond placating the masses, or else you risk causing bigger issues.

[Simon_Jester]

Of course it's more subtle than that. Retributive justice exists precisely because that common set of norms or "morality" is already in place; the behavior wouldn't be defined as crime or socially deviant, and in need of "example making", if it didn't. In speaking of retributive justice it's understood that you're dealing with behaviors that "we don't do".

True; part of my argument is that I'd like a way to help preserve this into the future, for certain crimes. I'm not so much worried about mass murderers- every society rejects a thug who rapes and kills people by the roadside. But I am somewhat worried about political terrorists*, and greatly worried about executive white-collar malefactors.

Our own commitment to the rule of law makes us specially vulnerable to the second category, because the legal code gets so complex that someone can effectively slip out of retribution for causing millions or billions' of dollars of harm to an economy, or ruining many lives, for the sake of their own enrichment.

*Like Anders Breivik- he's getting out of jail in 21 years and what message does that send, both to people who think like him and to people who belong to the party he just killed dozens of youth leadership members of?

And this isn't limited to deterrence. For example, a nation with a custom of tyrannicide is protected not just against bold, ruthless people who might want to become a tyrant, but also weaves that into the traditions of the state- that arbitrary power is bad, that it is right to punish people for seeking it out, that the state will not bow to foreign tyrants any more than domestic ones.

You're still speaking of deterrence, only framed in general terms instead of individual-specific terms.

I'm not so sure. Again, you're not just trying to deter people from committing a specific crime; you're trying to indirectly shape the ethical landscape in ways that promote the stability of society, not by creating fear of the consequences of committing a crime, but by promoting the idea that the action X, and related actions X' and X'' and so on, are all anathema to the society.

I'm not sure that's deterrence at all. It's not what I normally think of as deterrence, maybe that's all. Because it doesn't involve the element of fear that 'normal' deterrence does.

It's not just to scare people straight, it's to define civil society and the state in opposition to the sort of people who do such things- which is all the better reason to do it to people who commit hate crimes.

I don't care if they're afraid of being punished. I'm for punishing them for the salutary effect on everyone else- and not in the "ooh we get to watch people be punished sense," either.

Strain theory, in the vein of Durkheim's or Merton's anomie, suggests that this approach clearly works as norm enforcement for some segment of society, but it also brings the unfortunate consequence of alienating those who don't feel they have any stake in that society. You wind up placating the stakeholders and alienating the people who don't share those feelings of legitimacy -- which, ironically enough, leads to more crime and less trust in the existing values.

Aha. Now there you have me. This is certainly a problem when you enforce the norms against a large minority on behalf of a majority, or on the majority on behalf of an elite. Witness the extensive use of the death penalty in 1600s-1700s England and, as I noted here (or elsewhere recently?) the culture of "as well to hang for a sheep as for a lamb" that arose in response.

Or you could look at the War on Drugs- a minority gets disproportionate, very life-damaging punishments for crimes that are perceived as heinous by the majority... but less bad for the minority.

My argument is that such punishments should be restricted to a very small minority. People who commit horrible damage, either by personally striking a blow at civil society the way terrorist-murderers like Breivik do, or who commit some offense against a few individuals that totally throws away all the standards of cooperation between people that society depends on- definitely a violent crime, probably a lethal crime with extra aggravating factors thrown in.

I don't think you're too likely to see a disaffected minority upset by the practice of putting mass murderers in jail for life without parole.

The social benefits of punishment for the sake of punishment are hazy at best, certainly too hazy for the overly simplistic idea that punishment leads to net benefit in the form of reinforced social norms and values. I won't argue that it's appropriate in some cases, but it needs to have a utility beyond placating the masses, or else you risk causing bigger issues.

Well, I'm against it save in the most extreme cases- those where there is already a very solid argument for "imprison to keep them away from the rest of us," and "imprison in hopes of deterring," and possibly other factors that have nothing to do with vague social ideas.

For me, this is at most the tipping point between classing a short list of crimes at the very top of the scale from "a really long time and you might well die in prison before getting any chance of parole" to "life without parole."

[whackadoodle]

As a side note, Texas will no longer be honoring last meal requests.
Reuters

"Enough is enough," state Senator John Whitmire wrote in a letter on Thursday to prison officials, prompting the move. "It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. It's a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim."

The letter was in apparent response to the dinner requested, but not eaten, by white supremacist Lawrence Brewer before he was put to death on Wednesday night for the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr.

Apparently, his last meal request was

a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover's pizza, a big bowl of okra with ketchup, a pound of barbecue, a half a loaf of bread, peanut butter fudge, a pint of ice cream and two chicken-fried steaks.

Seriously? Ketchup?

[Broomstick]

Seriously, that sounded like enough food for a week.

But yeah, just because one murderous racist douchebag abused the traditional "last meal request" policy Texas will revoke it for everyone else the state is about to murder. Real classy, guys. I mean, don't even consider limiting it to say, just one entree, just dump it entirely.

[MKSheppard]

I like how a Democratic State Senator did that.

Link

Senator Whitmire, a Democrat and chairman of the state Senate Criminal Justice Committee, threatened to introduce legislation if the last meal offer was not withdrawn.

"Enough is enough," he said. "It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. It's a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim."

Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, replied within hours, saying the tradition would be abolished.

Mr Livingston said the inmates would now "receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit".

I got no problem with giving them a last meal, or request for last meal, as long as it's limited to something reasonable, like $30-35 USD. It costs nothing next to the other costs of an execution.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That's simply subhuman of Texas to deny last requests like that, I'm not sure how else I can possibly phrase it. They've really reached the phase of even the most petty of tortures.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

As a side note, Texas will no longer be honoring last meal requests.

I take it this State Senator does not understand this is what is supposed to separate us from the likes of Torquemada.

[Simon_Jester]

Redleg, I think the problem here is that we live in a society where the attitude towards criminals among the pro-death-penalty crowd has become more and more punitive. The attitude seems to be that they deserve to die, so they deserve nothing good ever, even things like "appeals" and "last meal." What need to filthy vermin have of dignity, after all?

This troubles me profoundly, because I think that there are very good reasons to adhere to Churchill's observation that "when you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite." It's one of the biggest problems with the death penalty- how do we balance between being committed to executing someone in the first place, and not making this death torturous and miserable?

The more we justify killing criminals by pointing to what horrible human beings they are, the harder it is to preserve the spirit in which we grant the condemned small mercies to soften the great mercilessness that put them on death row in the first place.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

Redleg, I think the problem here is that we live in a society where the attitude towards criminals among the pro-death-penalty crowd has become more and more punitive. The attitude seems to be that they deserve to die, so they deserve nothing good ever, even things like "appeals" and "last meal." What need to filthy vermin have of dignity, after all?

Oh, I agree. I wanted to throw up when the jackasses started dancing in the streets at the announcement bin Laden had been killed. The only thought in my head seeing that was, 'and they wonder why people across the planet chant 'Death to America' and the like'. The second was to note that the ones I saw couldn't have been more than 7 - 10 yrs old when the Twin Towers came down. Its something profoundly disturbing, but then again nothing really new.