The Harris Execution

For those who are not sure how they feel about the death penalty, one method of arriving at a conclusion might be to take a look at the company you’ll be keeping.

It was hard not to see the difference between the thoughtful, sad compassion on the faces of those who carried candles, read poems, sang and prayed and the rabid faces of those who yelled epithets and generally carried on as if the death penalty was a football game and not the most serious of statements any government can make about one of it’s citizens.

Does it mean anything that the United States has more people in its prisons than any nation on Earth, is the only Western industrialized nation (except South Africa) that still puts people to death in its prisons, and yet our violent crime rate continues to escalate, and we have more murders per year in the city of Los Angeles than in all the nations of Western Europe combined? Yes it does. It means that our “get tough” policies are simply not working.

The “criminal justice” system is a growth industry whose budget escalates at a rate our educational system can only dream of, at taxpayers’ expense. As President Eisenhower warned in reference to the military-industrial complex, the criminal justice/prison construction industry will continue to grow unabated until thoughtful and brave people think through the jingoism of right-wing politics and start working on saving the next generation. We can’t put everyone in jail forever.

LUKE BREIT, San Diego