:cool-zone: end this fucking blight of a country. love and power to the people who head out to protest tonight.
don't watch this if you value your sanity.
:cool-zone: end this fucking blight of a country. love and power to the people who head out to protest tonight.
don't watch this if you value your sanity.
My opinion is the only crimes that should be capital crimes are gross abuse of power. Shit like this is the best example, but I think also prosecutorial misconduct (i.e. planting evidence) deserves lifelong gulag if not death. It's such a perversion of anything we might call justice that it needs the kind of sentencing we give to our poorest right now.
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The problem with, say, killing prosecutors is that all the prosecutors know each other. They went to the same college, they drink at the same clubs, they all read the same articles by the same authors. They have a strong social incentive to cover for each other. After all, it might be their head on the block one day, and if the prosecutor in charge owes them a favor then some evidence might go missing, or the case might get screwed up in a way that demands a re-trial.
In so far as I understand the research, harsh punishments rarely if ever result in desirable deterrence. From the standpoint of social harm removing a prosecutor from their position and baring them from professions where they would wield power serves the same purposes as executing them; In each case they are removed from the situation in which they had power to abuse. One of the benefits of abolishing the carceral punishment system is that in many cases reducing the stakes for bad behavior opens up more options for correcting that behavior. If a person knows they face death for misconduct they'll do everything in their power to subvert the system. If their penalty is being barred from their profession without being economically destroyed or losing their freedom then, from their perspective, cooperation with the state and the community becomes a much more reasonable choice.
While there are certainly moral and ethical arguments for prison abolition, community justice, and restorative justice there are also arguments that can be made from a position of pure, ice-cold pragmatism.
:gold-communist: I mean I want to believe your :bloomer: energy, I just have a deep cynicism about the rehabilitation of the powerful who are willing to abuse a system where they already have the power.
Still this is very hopeful and the kind of communist world I want to live in
SORRY to respond to a 4 day old post but ive had this tab tucked away for a while and only got to reading through it.
I think the strongest case for death sentences, in this case, for the gross abuse of power is that these people cannot be deterred. They have been structurally engineered, as you acknowledge, to believe certain things, in fact, small mercies may further inculcate these beliefs that the state of things where they are punished is abhorrent and evil. The death penalty provides a sure fire safety to society, not their conception of society like the one we live in, but to our ideal society that they, who know how power operates, how our cultural bureaucracy works, from ever using that knowledge to potentially hurt us ever again.
In fact, this is primarily how the current state of things sees us. We cannot be exiled, as they did in the 1910s and 1920s, or blackballed and harangued and imprisoned like they did from the 40s to the 60s. They have to kill us, because thats the only way the dialectic and tension gets smoothed over for at least the time being. They can infiltrate our groups and imprison our leaders, but they have to kill people to stop a revolution, and much is the same for the counter-revolution.
Political corruption should potentially lead to the wall too. A government official giving inflated contracts to his friends harms everyone.