This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

Lee Berman · 12 Apr 2012, 13:44 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:44:16 -0400
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
Message-ID: <SNT123-W1796912A6DA3840FFB7509CF3A0 at phx.gbl>

>Gwern Branwen: crimes are generally committed by people one knows. This is true for
>murder

Good point. We think of the prison system as monocultural but it isn't. I once had the
assignment to teach a cultural anthropology course in medium security prison. On my 
first day I was told that my students would be almost all murderers. This was because
the typical thief or thug in medium security was too stupid to get into college courses.
And the hardened criminal murderers were all in max or supermax. The students I had were
all the normal guys who caught their wife with someone or something like that and snapped,
but otherwise had led crime-free lives. There is a very intense caste system in operation
in prison.

>David Stockhoff: that argument that the death penalty is cheaper 
>than incarceration was debunked ages ago. I once believed it too. But 
>the long years of incarceration PLUS appeals before anyone is executed 
>are far more expensive than simple incarceration

Ditto. The only way to make executions cost-effective is to become like China, Iran and
Iraq:  do it quickly, do it often and do it without the possibility of appeal.

(FWIW the prison I worked at did have an electric chair. After an execution there was a
general sense of gloom among all, prisoners and staff, for a week or so)

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net