Barbaric criminal justice
I wrote this after I saw 60 Minutes. Lead prosecutor Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison touched me so when he talked about having compassion for Derek Chauvin because he’s a human being.
Okay, the idea is for the world to work. What about our criminal justice system? In the US, 68% of people who are released from jail re-offend. In Norway it’s 20%. What they do is rehabilitate. Being away from families is punishment. If rehabilitation hasn’t worked when a sentence is up, which is a max of 20 years, people are re-incarcerated. What I’d add is service. I’d say if you’re incarcerated it puts you in the employ of the state. Not forced labor but service according to abilities that’s all gainful to the state as payback for crimes. You not only would get people rehabilitated but would have benefited society. Housing people in cages and moving them around in chains is a barbaric way to treat humans. Our eye for an eye ethic is so ingrained we don’t even see how primitive we are. It’s the vestige of not recognizing Indians and blacks and Jews as human. This shining beacon of democracy is still discovering the greater reaches to where we are the embodiment of our ideals.
And can we talk about boxing? I wish we would. People pummeling each other for rabid fans is the modern throwing people to the lions. Maybe we could stop doing that. Bullfighting after boxing.
I can image the incredulity in the future. “They did what? They threw bombs at one another and they knocked their buildings down? Why would they do that? And that they had a category where it was permissible, in fact encouraged, to kill each other is so hard to take in, but it just took a long time to get past all that ignorance for people to be able to turn their attention to making the world a better place.”