the new coliseum - punishment in the US
Saturday, February 7th, 2009Do things like this scare other people? An article on digg.com talks about a russian kid who attacks his sister’s rapist with a knife, inflicting 8 stab wounds before being killed by the rapist. That’s heroism, unquestionably, and in my book a totally acceptable level of violence for a situation like that: the guy was trying to rape his sister, so the boy stabbed him; the boy was stabbing the guy, so the guy killed him. It makes sense.
But the comments are where things go wrong:
What a tragical story! I’m usually a pacifist, but I would condemn all those pedophiles with a death sentence!
- sanela86
I heard a story from a Russian woman. She talked about Russian prisons. She told me that it is sufficient to lock the criminal up into prison and inform the other prisoners about his crime. They will pay daily attention to him and no prison guard will disturb them. Normally those criminals hang-up themselves within a few months.
- Wulffy
Pretty much the same in the US. Child-murders and rapists are usually dealt with…appropriately…in prison.
- AriaStar
To begin with, you can’t have it both ways. Is rape morally acceptable, or not? This is almost exactly like the death penalty - is it okay to murder people in cold blood, or not? Non-consensual sexual acts are obviously morally reprehensible, regardless of the circumstances. The victim never ‘deserves it’ - because if they ‘deserve it’ in prison, it’s a real slippery slope towards ‘deserving it’ outside of prison too. This disgusting cheer-leading for prison rape as ‘justice’ is totally sickening - and terrifying.
I’m almost afraid to contemplate the possibility that criminal vengeance has become a source of entertainment in our culture - we like seeing the bad guys get handcuffed, smacked around, pepper-spray, and tazered. Do we really take pleasure in the knowledge that people are being raped, or killed? Can we really call this ‘justice’? This is where ‘moral police’-like groups come from - citizen vigilante militia that violently enforce their own behavioral restrictions in spite of the freedoms provided to citizens by law.