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"Capital Punishment"

I want to re-ignite the debate about capital punishment. With th events of the last two weeks concerning those missing girls culminating in the arrest of two people, I advocate a return of capital punishment. I don't care how they do it, but these sort of people don't deserve to live - prison is too good for them.

What do you think? Please none of this humanitarian crap defending them though - humanitarianism wasn't high on the two in question when they committed the crime, was it?

MoJoJoJo wrote:
> I never said "all crime" I said most violent crime. Blue
> collar crime. Working class crime. Basically, muggings, attacks, armed
> robbery etc etc. Almost all crimes with victims are working class
> crimes

Erm, but how would wiping out the working class (or working class attitudes) have stopped those two girls (which sparked off this whole debate) from getting murdered...? That crime certainly had victims, and the killers had nothing to gain from the attack.

Also, you are mistaking something having no victims with the victims not being physically harmed. If someone perpertrates credit card fraud for instance and spend a ton of your cash, that's hardly victimless. And my point still stands that you cannot eradicate a social class in our class system without eradicating the entire class system. The only reason the middle class don't feel as though they're on the bottom of the pile is because there is the working class- eradicate working class attitudes etc. so they effectively become 'like' middle class people but with a bit less cash and the middle class begins to feel it's on the bottom of the pile, etc. etc.

You cannot just erase one level of a class structure without the whole thing collapsing.

I know this sounds stupid but i wish that the victims or their familys could sort the vilians out themselves, and im not talking about burglary or grand theft auto :), but i know for sure if my child was taken buy some weird perv and then they killed my child i would not feel justice has been done unless i could do something about it, instead it goes through the courts and they still get to live inside of a prison, were's the justice in that, or even get the victims to say what the punishment will be, a while back around where i live a boy was kidnapped, raped and then murdered at the time the kids father was in the army, well the police captured the vilian and took him to a cell in the local cop shop, at this time the dad and some friend had gone A.W.O.L from the forces with a shotgun and actually tried to break into the cells to get the murderer, well he got 5 years in prison while the murderer got 15 years nd only seved 12, there is no justice in that. I was thinking the other day that the max sentance for kidnapping is 15years and the sentance for murder is 25 years max actually serve about 20 years unless you can make yourself look insane then get done for manslaughter and only get 15 years, i reckon this is one of the reason's why these kidnappers usually kill there kidnappee's.

c.b.

Capital punishment is as daft as corpooral punishment. in saudi arabia or somewhere like that they cut ur hand of for stealing, and some guy was convicted. convicted wrongly. they gave hime some money after it but nothing really compensates for a hand, does it?

same thing could happen with the loss of a life, but that is a little more serious

I never said "all crime" I said most violent crime. Blue collar crime. Working class crime. Basically, muggings, attacks, armed robbery etc etc. Almost all crimes with victims are working class crimes

But MoJo, what I mean is that crime doesn't just come from poor working class areas, it comes from all social groups. And why? Usually because of greed. The middle/ upper class families may not go out and beat up someone of a different race, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not rascist. They may, for example exercise power in their jobs by not hiring a person from an ethnic minority, or may pay them less, or whatever. And this is just an example. All classes are capable of criminal activity. You can't just say, 'ah, the lower classes are the cause of crime' and expect murder, muggings, robbery, etc. to stop. Lower class people may be more likely to carry out crime for monetary gain simply because they don't have that much cash, but that won't stop murderers. The kind of people that murder children have nothing to gain through doing it. So stamping out a lower class attitude is going to do nothing to help stop these kind of murderers is it? No person in their right mind is just going to kill some children are they? So obviously these kinds of crimes are not committed by the 'lower classes' they are committed by people who have something seriously wrong with them.

Sibs wrote:
> MoJo, how do you propose you do away with the working class?

-------

I'm not talking about getting rid of them, I'm talking about taking away their tendancies, their deviance etc. Working class people don't HAVE to commit crimes, and those that do it usually do it because they want the things they can't have. Move a working class family into a middle class environment, and I'm sure that the next generation that live there won't be as deviant as the last, then the next generation even less.

The government and councils like to stick all the working class and known trouble maker families together, which is the worst thing they can do. Demolish the slums and mix the so called trouble making families in with the more "normal" neighbourhoods. I'm sure someone's going to ask me if I would like a known criminal family in my street, and I wouldn't like it, but if it's one step in the right direction to getting rid of the majority of crime, then so be it

Then all we'd have would be white collar crime, which doesn't have many REAL victims (as opposed to an old lady being murdered in her own home)

Sibs wrote:
> how do you propose you do away with the working class?

One day advanced robots who don't complain and are highly efficient will replace these classes, whether this is good or bad is anyones guess.
Well maybe.

Negativity breeds negativity.

The aim of capital punishment must always be to reduce crime. That is the aim of all punitive measures taken against criminals. Most of you seem to want it as a form of retribution. And that is wrong. It's just murder in a different, legalised guise. It enforces the division between the state and the individual (the state may kill but the individual may not) when what is needed is a sense of community, of togetherness.

You will notice that crime falls during times when a sense of community is felt, during a war for instance. Admittedly the absence of many men off fighting helps too, but the fact remains that when someone feels apart of something good they do not try to destroy.

However, I do accept that some people are intrinsically and irrevocably evil. These people should be sentenced to life, and I mean life. The problem with a death penalty is that while you will get these people, you will also find that the vast majority of those on the death row are from impoverished backgrounds and racial minorities. If you want to reduce crime, you don't need a death penalty, but a systematic program of social reform.

And I will say this again. Yes, some people may deserve to die in your eyes - child abductors, paedophiles, mass murderers, Osama bin Laden - but these people will be a tiny minority of those executed. The rest will be the poor in both monetary and educational terms. You need to tackle the roots of crime not wait until the tree has grown and chop off errant shoots with your capital punishment, because by then the crimes have been committed and your actions are empty.

Short and simple. Bring it back.

MoJo, how do you propose you do away with the working class? As long as we live in a capitalist society there will always be those on the bottom of the pile who have very low paid jobs (or no jobs at all) and as much as society and that may look down on them, society could not function without the 'unskilled' labourers to do our dirty work. Granted, more and more this is done by machines in big factories etc. But there are still jobs that others won't do. And while you may mean a 'working class mentality' as long as these people are poor and have little money they are going to turn to other things to try and forget these problems. Alcohol, drugs, smoking... In the end it is impossible to 'do away' with the working class or a working class mentality. And as much as people generalise things into making the working class the scapegoat for crime it goes far beyond that. Dealing drugs would hardly be finacially viable if it was only the poor working class who used them. Every class from the rich film and TV stars to the stereotypical middle class family to the on the dole unemployed may take drugs. If you're going to do away with one social class you have to do away with them all.