Jack F. Twist > wrote:

>> 40% of our prison population are there for non-violent drug offenses.
>> Do you believe that's an enlightened approach? Giving drug users
>> free room and board at taxpayer expense?


Mark Nobles > responds:

> That's not the problem. The problem is that these people can't be
> paroled, so the violent criminals are getting early release. This is a
> double hit - we pay to support prisons that are full of harmless
> hippies, while the father rapers and mother stabbers are out on the
> streets raping and stabbing.

We obviously need to build more prisons, then. Maybe Halliburton could
be persuaded to take up the contract.


>> There's never been a single formal study that shows capital punishment
>> deters crime. All it does is bring our society down to the same pea
>> brained, revengeful mentality as those we murder.

> Ignoring the fact that we occasionally murder an innocent man.

Contrary to popular belief, "killing" != "murder."

murder, n.: the crime of unlawfully killing a person,
especially with malice aforethought

-- http://www.webster.com/dictionary/murder

So mistakenly executing the wrong person, while regrettable, isn't
murder: it's done neither illegally nor with malice aforethought.

As Dennis Prager explained it in the same column I excerpted the
other day:

"An innocent may be killed? Many moral social policies
have the possibility and even the inevitability of the
death of innocents. As I noted in a previous column on
this very issue, even if raising speed limits means an
inevitable increase in innocents' deaths, the greater
good of higher speed limits will still prevail.

"In fact, if preventing the killing of innocents is what
should determine capital punishment policy, one should
support capital punishment. It is the absence of the
death penalty that leads to more innocent people being
killed. When there is no death penalty, convicted mur-
derers kill other prisoners and guards; and, when these
murderers escape, they kill innocent civilians. If those
of us who are for the death penalty have blood on our
hands when the state executes an innocent man, abolition-
ists [...] have the blood of innocents on their hands
every time a convicted murderer murders again."

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/colu...04/170335.html




Geoff

--
"And finally, welcome to my bozo bin. Try not to wail and gnash
your teeth too hard when you're cast into everlasting hell upon
your death." -- Jack F. Twist displays Christian forgiveness