Look, gang; this is a tough one - I work in a prison, as I have often said on this forum. For you folks this subject may indeed be horrible, & can cause upsetting emotions, but you must know that when you move on to something else or go to your day job you can forget about it (at least temporarily). Unless you have lived it, you can't possibly imagine the complications and complexities of prison reality. And that is in our "civilized" western democracies.

Because we are at least nominally "democracies," we actually do get a spectrum of folks drawn from society at large and there even are some rich guys in jail - generally the lawyer-who-paid-someone-to-kill-his-wife types, or physicians or other educated men and women who've committed sex crimes. On the other end of the wide spectrum we get, we have the kids who came up in the ghetto with no functional parents. They literally grew up on the streets. There is a large body of scientific information about psychopathology caused by a lack of maturation. The big point this literature usually makes is that some steps in the development process of a fully functioning mind never happen. What I see is that many of these people, like this evil woman, simply do not have any identifiable evidence of what we would recognize as a "conscience."

When you work with inmates, you inevitably feel very sorry for some of them, and tainted - even assaulted- by evil just to be in the presence of, others. and sometimes, no matter what their sentence is for, you won't know what will happen until after you have interacted with the person.

I'm completely convinced both by observation and what I have seen of the scientific literature that there is no way to instill a functioning conscience after a person has become an adult. These are the "cancer cells" of society. All you can do with cancer cells is cut them out. It's easy to say don't kill them, just lock them up and treat them accordingly.. But it's much harder to deal with them through a long life, in which they and their lawyers will demand "humane" conditions and medical care.

In a presumably sane, ethical western democracy I don't believe that we want concentration camp or "devils island" conditions to prevail in any of our public or private institutions. And this is truly a noble and appropriate instinct. Some of our guys just made (often stupid) mistakes & are chagrinned at it all, & just doin' their time, embarrassed & apalled at themselves, & ashamed for themselves & their families. THEY rarely are trouble makers.

On the other hand the twisting and perverversion of those noble instincts by SOME inmates, who often are those who have committed the most devastating, heinous, disgusting, utterly evil crimes, is almost beyond comprehension. You really have to experience it to believe it. The public media do not even portray 10% of the tip of the iceberg. It would take a lot of bandwidth just to encapsulate some of the more egregious cases and issues I have been - & still am routinely - involved with.

I have no easy answer for the question of capital punishment. I clearly see that we must cut out these cancer cells but, in all fairness, there are also many other societal "cancer cells." I would also feel better if I thought western "justice" systems were more equal in their treatment of crimes.

The "O.J." travesty is a case in point. I used to do forensics, and as a trained forensic practitioner (let alone a nominally reasonable adult human being) I consider the "O.J." case a galling insult to logic, science, morals, and any last pathetic vestige of integrity the courts may have had. It's no wonder the public has a a low opinion of the court system. Even most of the black inmates that I know were appalled at this case, and pointed out that with THEIR finances, they would have been convicted and executed long ago.

Lastly, I have had to take care of 20 year-old men in good health who murdered upwards of 20 to 30 people in gang wars. Incarcerated for life w/out possible parole - & maybe they should'nt ever be paroled, for they will surely (most of them) kill again, and likely to live another 40 to 70 years, and the type who have no conscience, they go REALLY crazy. I truly believe would be kinder to kill them.

Talk about no easy answers...

Peace, BK

Gotta go see the Battlefield Band!