Bob Blaylock
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #201
Our Eighth Amendment has been twisted against our interests as as society. We're left as prison as the only valid punishment for most crimes, because just about every other form of punishment has been deemed to be “cruel and unusual”, and thus prohibited under the Eighth Amendment.
It seems to me that in the case of an offender who is salvageable, prison is more cruel than many of the punishments that we are not allowed to apply.
Take someone who has committed a minor crime, but who has a job, and who is more or less trying to be a productive member of society, throw him in prison for a significant amount of time, and what you have done is cost him his job, ruined his prospects for future employment, and generally left him at an increased chance of thinking that he needs to resort to crime in order to survive.
A public whipping or caning would be humiliating and painful, but it would allow him thereafter to get back on with his life.
Now, I realize that there are some criminals who are irredeemable. No matter what you do to them, as soon as they have the chance, they will commit more crimes. There is no viable solution to these cases other than to permanently remove them from free society, either by keeping them in prison for life, or else putting them to death.
I do not consider myself nearly qualified to distinguish the salvageable offender from the irredeemable criminal, or even to make a better estimate of how significant each is as a proportion of the whole population of offenders, other than to cite a common rule in statistics, the 80/20 rule, which, as applied here, would estimate that 80% of crimes are probably committed by about 20% of the offenders, and that those 20% are the ones that need to be exterminated.
