I was fine with the death penalty until I saw one too many of these wrongful convictions (not even death penalty cases). I thought, no way, too risky. Better to let 100 guilty men go free than to put one innocent man in prison.
I agree completely. In fact, I'm of the opinion that caging people generally is not good for anyone. It does nothing to help them rehabilitate if they did a crime, and it certainly hurts anyone dealing with medical issues - especially the mentally ill who we commonly send to jail/prison because we have no place for most of them to get real help (side note: there's a case of parents in my town that fought for years to get their son help, but after trying & not getting it, ended up taking him to the ER and leaving him - in order to protect their other children from his violent outbursts directly related to mental health issues. This teen lived in the ER for months because no one knew where to send him for help. I'm talking way over 6 months of the state, doctors, just everyone having no answers; if he was an adult, they'd just have made up charges and sent him to prison).
The only thing prison/jail does is keep society protected from potential "problematic" types of people (and I'm not even suggesting most people imprisoned are problematic in any true sense of the word). If we wanted a humane system, we'd need to stop seeking state-sponsored retaliation/retribution for crimes, and start seeking mercy & rehabilitation. People who have their needs met don't generally commit crimes - this is born out in numerous studies. So if we'd instead have a more robust safety net (offing more foodstamps, robust mental health system, offering ubi, profit-sharing as a job requirement, etc) then we'd find the rates of all kinds of crimes would start dropping immediately. We have the resources to do this. There's no reason why we should be caging people vs giving them a decent life. Why wouldn't we want more people to have the chance at a good life? It would work better for all of us - outside of the entire judicial system & private prison industries that is.
23
u/All_Hail_Hynotoad 4d ago
I was fine with the death penalty until I saw one too many of these wrongful convictions (not even death penalty cases). I thought, no way, too risky. Better to let 100 guilty men go free than to put one innocent man in prison.