Capital Punishment
Solitary confinement represents one among the best means of keeping modern-day prisoners from communication and conflict, but has the most injurious effects on their health. Individuals imprisoned in conditions of solitary confinement demonstrate more psychotic behavior compared to normal prisoners; this includes higher rate of suicides (Thesis Statement). After a prisoner loses his/her mental capacity of understanding the reason for his/her imprisonment or punishment, subjecting him/her to solitary confinement is pointless. If one loses one's ability of understanding punishment, the consequences associated with one's actions become irrelevant and have no value. Thus, solitary confinement is crueler than capital punishment.
Lately, the subject of whether or not solitary confinement constitutes greater torture for prisoners than capital punishment (or death penalty), is gaining popularity (Writer Thoughts). The debate has reached a juncture where the favored option is capital punishment.
Solitary Confinement/Capital Punishment Background
During the early part of the 19th century, the concept of prisons was relatively new. Until that time, punishment for criminal offenses was meted out by communities. Some adopted the Hammurabian method of eye-for-eye retaliation, with public executions in packed town squares being the penalty for crimes, ranging from burglary to rape and murder. With the evolution of more nuanced judicial systems, community leaders looked for more civilized punishment methods, and even started toying with the "rehabilitation" concept (Biggs, 2009). The U.S. Supreme Court, in the latter part of the 19th century, started examining the growing pool of European clinical evidence, which demonstrated that solitary confinement was linked to dire psychological consequences. In Germany, where the isolationist Pennsylvania penal model was implemented, doctors noted a sharp rise in cases of psychosis among prison inmates. In the year 1890, the adoption of long-lasting solitary confinement as punishment was condemned by the nation's High Court, which noted that a significant number of inmates reached a stage of semi-fatuousness, while others exhibited violent insanity. Prisons constructed after this era (including Angola) increasingly took the shape of secure dormitories built for captive manual workers, as intended by the Auburn prison system. Prisoners were made to work for prison industries; this activity kept them busy while also aiding the institutions' maintenance. For instance, the "Sing Sing" prison was constructed atop a mine, entirely out of rocks underlying it, using the efforts of inmates.
The Eastern State Penitentiary, where the infamous "Philadelphia system" was born, failed miserably and closed down in the year 1971 -- a century after the "total isolation" idea was called off. However, what the system revealed concerning solitary confinement's torturous effects would have been attractive to people more concerned with retribution than with rehabilitation. In the last century, solitary confinement took the shape of a wholly punitive tool utilized for breaking the spirit of violent, disobedient, or disruptive inmates. However, it has seldom been employed as a long-duration punishment even by the most vengeful of wardens. After all, while broken spirits supposedly eliminate danger, danger is created by broken minds (Biggs, 2009). Nevertheless, in the last twenty-five years, the modern penal system appears to have reverted to the practices (minus the theories) governing Eastern State's Philadelphia System. Today's society does not trust the "penitent" element of "penitentiary" any longer and, clearly, "corrections" systems fail to "correct" disruptive behavior; rather, they appear to be breeding it. One may contend that, at present, nearly every maximum-security American prisoner is maintained in a sort of solitary setting for long durations of their prison terms. The introduction of "control unit" and "supermax" prisons during the early seventies has resulted in pod-based "security housing units" and prisons wherein each inmate is isolated in a separate cell for nearly the entire day.
Activists and lawyers have, for many decades, called into question the constitutionality of the severest punishments meted out by the American crime...
However, sociologists argue that the retributive justice theory suffers due to the lack of appreciation of circumstantial causes involved in the commission of crime. By counting 'free will' as the only factor involved in a crime the deontological thinking lacks in the comprehensive analysis of criminal behavior. For instance the disproportionate number of crimes by the economically disadvantaged African-Americans when compared to Caucasians is a clear instance for external
[DPIC] Similarly, many other researches were conducted but failed to offer any conclusive evidence as to the effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring crimes. The lack of consistency in these results presents a complex problem before us in evaluating the utilitarian value of death penalty. One more aspect to be considered under the utilitarian thought is the cost of executions. It is well-known that the legal cost of executions in
As such, it is unlikely to change in light of knowledge or information about the death penalty and its administration" (Vollum & Buffington-Vollum, p. 30). Furthermore, "those who scored higher on value-expressive attitudes were less accepting of information critical of the death penalty and, in turn, less likely to change their views in light of the information presented." Thus, the widespread support of the death penalty in the face
" This article puts forward the notion that when analyzing the "...relationships between minority groups and mainstream populations," the issue of whether the use of "formal control is applied fairly and consistently between these different groups" is a pivotal place to begin (Ruddell, et al., 2004). It is pivotal because "injustice" not only can have "a corrosive effect" on the perception of the fairness (or unfairness) of the criminal justice system;
Death Penalty An on-going Debate on Ethics and Morality The debate on whether the death penalty, or capital punishment, should be utilized in the United States is best seen in the varied laws that exist within each state. For this reason, many states, most of which are in the northern parts of the country are against capital punishment, while many southern states support this kind of a law. The U.S. map is
[James fieser] We also have to assess the 'proportionality of happiness' factor in determining if capital punishment is justifiable in a particular case. That is to say that if the execution of a prisoner will save the lives of many people capital punishment can be approved in such cases. Let us for instance take the example of a captured terrorist or a suicide bomber. In this case it is
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