U.S. slammed by U.N. as only country in the world that still sentences children to prison for life without parole.

See, this is the problem with a lot of you amateur activists is that you don't really consider problems holistically. There are massive cultural and technological differences between our world and that of 600 years ago.

No, I am considering those, as something obviously accounts for the declining murder rate. I am not inversely relating it to our public punishments. There have been massive technological advances, yes, but the murder rate was steadily declining, even beginning 600 years ago. It was on a steady decline long before communications technologies were making their impact. The shift from crimes of violence to crimes of property correlated heavily with improving economic conditions...

There was a very good reason that punishments were often public in the old times. There was no Google, no Wikiepedia, no Facebook newsfeed to inform people. Publicity and spectacle were ways to insinuate the justice system into the public consciousness and to allow the concepts to spread via word of mouth.

Yet, we now have these technologies, and you're arguing that the penalties still aren't visible enough, or have these technologies reduced the need for spectacle? Which is it?

You're also trapped in the same dead-end, fallacial argument that many death penalty opponents fall into. The idea that just because a deterrent doesn't deter everybody, that it doesn't deter anybody, which is categorically and demonstrably untrue, however it's a myth so often repeated that people assume it is true.

First, I didn't argue against the death penalty. Nor am I arguing on the basis that it merely doesn't deter everybody. Talk about fallacious arguments!

Above, you said:

Can guarantee that if they lined the freeways in high-crime areas with the crucified capital offenders, less people would fuck around.

Yet, it's demonstrably shown that more people fucked around when the execution as spectacle was still employed.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - alj.am