…What a horible sentence.
There’s a joke in there, but you have to be ready for a bit of thinking. For most of us, the phrase ‘Life on Earth.” is sort of a basic premise. Well yes there’s life on earth, and some of us happen to think we’re intelligent as well. I’m not about to argue the intelligent aspect, I’ve read suggestions that bacteria moving away from a hot surface is an indication of intelligence. And I’ve read the suggestions that there are no signs of intelligent life on Earth comming from as deep thinking of an authority as Stephen Hawking. In sort, the question of intelligence is not something I think is worth my involvement in at this time.
The ‘horible sentence’ part might clue a few people in. There’s arguments all over the place showing that the death penalty is effective, or isn’t effective, that there are flaws in our judicial system that let innocent men be imprisioned and executed for crimes that others are guilty of. Some think that imprisioning has an advantage over execution in that if later on we discover that the person was not the person who commited the crime, we can take them out of prison.
Perhaps. The problem is that even if you do that the person has had as significant of a disruption to their life as can be had. It’s nearly impossible to go back to living the way they did before. Even if you discount the time spent in prision, everyone that he or she worked with up until they were incarcerated will harbor thoughts that perhaps the original conviction was right. Or other people have taken up where they left off and the opening is no longer there. Someone else now owns what was their home. All their personal property was confiscated and sold by the govornment. etc. I strongly suspect that many people who were wrongly convicted have wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to be executed, as they struggle to put their lives back together.
For another interesting view on the subject, I would recommend reading “The NORP Think Factor,” Staige Productions (Winona, MN)(1994) by judge Dennis A. Challeen
As an observation, several crimanl justice systems over the centuries have come up with alternatives to imprisonment and execution for serious crimes. While we tend to think of execution as the death penalty, I would include such acts as judicial decisions to remove limbs or body parts in response to theft or casteration for sex related crimes to be part of the execution family of responses. Outside of these two responses we have had a history of alternatives. Young men were often offered the opportunity to join the military as an alternative to going to jail. And both the US and Australia have been penal colonies (or at least parts of each have been) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Along the penal colony line of thinking, Amercan Indians would kick out tribal members who committed acts that the tribe considered unacceptable to the tribe. This may not seem like as significant of a response as imprisonment, but at the time any person traveling alone was looked upon with great suspicion. The advantage was that a capable person could make a new life for themselves. Also along this line has been the requirement that people do community service of some sort, often picking up trash along the highway, but other types as well, including hard labor.
Some variations on the theme have been proposed. Wall off New York and make the entire city a prison. Or LA. Islands of Death, where no-one leaves alive. In the Science Fiction universe, the Moon, Marse, Venus, Ganimeed, space stations, colony ships, etc. have all been considered for prison colonies at one time or another. For some reason most people are treating Earth as the place that people ‘want’ to be. And for the moment, it’s the only place we’ve got that’s reasonably close to being self sustaining. Granted we seem to be pretty good at changing the self sustaining part of that statement, but I’m personally more interested in changing the ‘only place we’ve got’ portion.
In the long run, I’m inclined to believe that should we figure out how to get off this rock in a sustainable way, that we’ll see two phases of criminal handling. The first will be to set up penal colonies on remote worlds. The second will be to take away the criminal’s opportunity to profit from space and comit them to ‘Life, on Earth.” And as a result, eventually Earth will be abandoned. Which will probably do the human race great favors, but we’ll see some significant loss as well.
But that’s my thoughts on the matter. For the moment, I’m stuck here with most of the rest of you.
