Poll: The death penalty, are you for or against?

The death penalty, are you for or against?

  • For

    Votes: 221 42.6%

  • Against

    Votes: 243 46.8%

  • Undecided

    Votes: 55 10.6%
  • Total voters
    519
We do have rehabilitation in this country. It;s not difficult to find that out. The fact we have comparably high reoffending rates would be a pretty good indication that it doesn't work for most people.
 
elmarko1234 said:
My thoughts exactly :( - I expected better.

Why people are so resistant to doing a little research I have no idea.
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I'm sorry that I don't achieve your standards. :( I was merely stating an opinion, and I don't read the daily mail - but read the news and listen to it on the radio/tv. I apologise for having a differing opinion, but I'm afraid this is how I feel - so you can either accept it or not, however, please don't make assumptions or imply stupidity or idiocy on my behalf, that's unfair.

Admittedly a lot of my opinions are anecdotal; I know police officers a couple of prison officers and within the company I work with, I deal with a lot of people who have worked with/along side and part of the care and justice system. I haven't researched anything since seeing this thread as I'[m just reading it as I found it interesting.

Purely on the death penalty thing you won't change my opinion on it though - I will and am vehemently against it. I've already explained my views on this.

Sure take the Nordic process as an example, but a tracing paper approach for this sort of problem is not the way to go. We have a problem in this country and our prisons are overburdened, prison isn't as tough as it could be ('m not saying it should necessarily be like a concentration camp) however it's clearly not working. I'm loathed to invest more money into the current system as I'm not confident it'll do much good. With the infrastructure in place at the moment, the death penalty is just too scary a concept to even think about introducing. I personally think it's a backward step as well - it's antediluvian, solves nothing, and accomplishes nothing.
 
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RaohNS said:
I'd hazard a guess that most people on here who are in the "No" camp don't have a child of their own. If anything happened to my child (God forbid) you are damn right i'd not want to share the planet with someone so evil.
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Actually, I suspect the opposite to be true. As a parent of three children, my position is that I feel that I have a better understanding of the preciousness of life than I did before they were born such that my standpoint is very much against capital punishment. Indeed, thinking about it from an entirely rational stance, the fact that there is the possibility that I would want vengeance against someone who murdered my child makes me thankful that the death penalty is not an option. On this, I have always found the lives of Linda and Peter Biehl, following the murder of their daughter Amy, to be completely humbling.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
We do have rehabilitation in this country. It;s not difficult to find that out. The fact we have comparably high reoffending rates would be a pretty good indication that it doesn't work for most people.
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It more accurately indicates that we are not very good at delivering effective rehabilitation, particularly when compared to other relative countries.

Not to mention that rehabilitation programs are often inaccessible to those that would benefit the most from them, such as short term custodial offenders and young offenders.

There is also the issue of ineffective community supervision, often offenders are released into the same situations and environments that contributed to their offending to begin with, also up until the economic crisis in 2007 re offending rates were decreasing year of year as increased funding and provision took effect from 2000 onward.....funding that has since seen significant cuts and as a result (and potentially the economic situation adding the offending rates) the re-offending rates have begun to increase.
 
Hatter The Mad said:
Low maximum sentences, vastly better prison conditions (space, access to resources). Fewer offences which carry a jail sentence. Better training and education programmes. Better mentoring. Ultimately, vastly greater funding per prisoner.
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Maybe that's why 68% of all rapes are done by immigrants in sweden?
They know they won't get a hard sentence.

Oh forgot to say more then twice the amonut of women get raped in sweden then the UK.
 
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George Hincapie said:
Of course it works. Dead criminals don't commit any more crime do they? Besides, a bullet is far cheaper than 10 years of housing and food costs; the perfect answer in these times of austerity.
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Except it isn't.

  • A 2003 legislative audit in Kansas found that the estimated cost of a death penalty case was 70% more than the cost of a comparable non-death penalty case. Death penalty case costs were counted through to execution (median cost $1.26 million). Non-death penalty case costs were counted through to the end of incarceration (median cost $740,000).
    (December 2003 Survey by the Kansas Legislative Post Audit)
  • In Tennessee, death penalty trials cost an average of 48% more than the average cost of trials in which prosecutors seek life imprisonment.
    (2004 Report from Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury Office of Research)
  • In Maryland death penalty cases cost 3 times more than non-death penalty cases, or $3 million for a single case.

  • (Urban Institute, The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland, March 2008)
    In California the current sytem costs $137 million per year; it would cost $11.5 million for a system without the death penalty.
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Obviously these examples are from America, as we don't have the death penalty. But it's clear to see that it isn't cheaper, unless it's done in manner such as China (i.e. irresponsibly).

koolpc said:
But, in this country, they know that the punishment is lame!
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So explain why countries with the death penalty more often than not have a higher murder rate than us?
 
Speaking of crime in general, I believe prisons should be more strict and more feared, no electronics other than a radio should be permitted in the cells, forced work or schooling. Ultimately though the prison service should have more funding and much better rehabilitation facilities.

On the subject of capitol punishment, I am for it on the grounds of unquestionable guilt and the severity of the crime.

People seem to think though that capitol punishment is the be-all answer to the horrendous crimes we see in our nation and beyond, but ultimately I believe its a combo of broken welfare, lack of good education and job opportunities that lends itself to crime and mental disorder.

Also I believe if you leave school at 16 and don't go to college or straight into a job you should have to do 2 years cadetship of some sort to give them direction and the mental capacity/belief to better themselves.

Just my thoughts.
 
I am for it, but only if the person was found guilty without any doubt, and only for crimes such as pre-meditated murder.

Why should they still have freedom of life when they have taken a life, an eye for an eye i say.
 
I would be for the death penalty if we had a reasonable justice system. But out justice system is very unreasonable and corrupt.

But where we have people having their lives stolen from for committing victimless crimes. Where we have something like a 5%-10% false imprisonment for serious crime statistics. As recently discovered in the states where they were using new DNA techniques to verify past convictions and found that there was something like 7% of serious crimes, murder, rape etc were actually false imprisonments. Some people spent 30 years in jail for not committing any crimes.

The death penalty in my opinion should be reserved for obvious heinous crimes like the recent mass murder of people in norway or the keeping of child sex slaves in austria and the US. Where we have irrefutable evidence that the person is guilty.

But it won't be used for that, next thing you know they will be ending the life of petty victimless crimes. You might say i am over exaggerating. But I am not.
 
Against, there have been enough crimes where the wrong person has been prosecuted and adding the death penalty to that would be horrendous. I'm against!!
 
Dj_Jestar said:
I got as far as "victimless crimes" and stopped reading. What utter clap tra.. oh, it's groen.
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Victimless crimes do exist.

Name the victim in the following crime.

Person A grows a certain popular plant in his house for personal consumption & does not involve anybody else.
 
Against. As people have said wrong person found guilty many times adding the death penalty just makes it even worse.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
We do have rehabilitation in this country. It;s not difficult to find that out. The fact we have comparably high reoffending rates would be a pretty good indication that it doesn't work for most people.
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It's a possible argument that it indicates that but I'd suggest that simply we don't do rehabilitation very well in this country which is reflected in the recidivism statistics. Rehabilitation tends to be a half-hearted approach falling as it does between the camp who recommend we pursue it properly and the camp who advocates bread and gruel, breaking rocks and capital punishment. I'm sure there are some good rehabilitation programmes but generally speaking we haven't attempted it very well.

Rehabilitation won't work for everyone and nor should it be expected to, in any system you will find people who abuse that system but a principle behind any good support system should be to minimise the abuses while still making it freely accessible to those who will benefit from it. It's not cheap to implement rehabilitation properly and that would make it unpopular even if it didn't also fail on the emotive grounds to people who want to see criminals being given what they view as respectably harsh punishments.

It's odd though, being forced to confront why you've been partaking in such horrible and damaging behaviour and accepting that your way of life has basically been all wrong sounds pretty tough to me but in an entirely different way to the futility of breaking rocks or whatever is deemed a suitable punishment. It's essentially changing a whole lifetime of behaviour and that's not easy to do but although often expensive to do it should reap rewards over the life of the criminal because there will hopefully be less expense from imprisonment in the future, less expense on trials and if there are no further victims then society benefits from that and that's rather difficult to put a price on.

However going back to why rehabilitation cannot potentially work here - could anyone give me a reason why people in the UK are so fundamentally different from people in the Nordic countries that behaviourally rehabilitation is not possible? Is the UK more inherently criminal than the Nordic countries or more intransigent and unable to change their ways? That's not to say we can just copy the whole system but taking ideas from best practice is rarely a poor idea if you're willing to adopt them properly.
 
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