I disagree with the death penalty, instead of worrying about whether or not to put someone to death, we should use more of our resources to talk to people who are on death row or who are sentenced to a life sentence, to try and find out from them what made them commit the crimes that they did, that got them where they are now. We should try to find out what we, as people, as a society, can do to help people who commit such bad crimes. I believe that many people who commit bad crimes have been, at some time in their life, victims of some sort themselves, and as such their case warrants further study.
Instead of calling for the execution of prisoners we should use the time to talk with them, especially those who are given a life sentence, and try to gain valuable knowledge from them and learn about why they committed the crimes that they did.
We should try to find out such things as what was the relationship between them and their victims, and why or how did those people end up as the victim? Were there ways that people could have intervened that could have helped to prevent the crime from happening? Do they think that the tendency to commit murder has a biological origin? Did they feel angry all their lives or was their life more influenced by environmental factors along the way? We should talk extensively to people who are sentenced to a life sentence to try and learn everything that we can from them because there is no one else in society that can tell us so much about what leads a person to commit these types of terrible crimes then the people who have been involved in these situations.
If we take the time to examine these cases, perhaps we can learn more about what we can do to help prevent such things from happening again. Do we need more school programs, more community programs, more children’s services, better employment services, more drug treatment services, or more mental health care programs available? What are some of the ways that they think that we can help and prevent these types of crimes from occurring?
I am proud of the progress that our country and our criminal justice system has made towards being attentive to social problems and to individual’s needs, however, there is still more that we can do to make our criminal justice system a responsive and illuminated system.
We should not focus on the whether or not we support the death penalty, we should focus more on trying to reach out and help people and to prevent crimes. It is better to prevent crime. It is better to treat other human beings with respect. The cycle of violence has to end somewhere. I would rather try and help healing begin.
This blog post is an official entry for the <a href=”http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/scholarship”>Law Blogger’s Scholarship</a>, sponsored by The Law Office of Joshua Pond, <a href=”http://www.joshuapondlaw.com/”>http://www.joshuapondlaw.com</a>.
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