That's a broad brush, WD. Is the Horatio Alger myth more popular in the death belt of the South, the handful of states (TX!!, VA, FL, SC, GA, AL, MS, LA) that account for the overwhelming majority of death sentences? Maybe some, but that can't be all. Can we leave race out of the analysis? Don't we have to put the death penalty in the larger context or US criminal justice and the carceral state? Isn't the War On Crime or Being Tough On Crime or LawNOrder rhetoric actually expressly designed to be code for legitimate racial bigotry?
One thing that's real interesting is how much Americans are willing to pay for the death penalty. The capital process is fabulously expensive, far more so than life without parole, and absorbs vastly disproportionate amounts of the judiciary's time. A small indicator: several state Supreme Courts hire "death clerks" -- I had a friend who had a clerkship like this in NJ -- whose main job it is just or mainly to work on capital cases. I don't know whether this is widely understood (I sorta doubt it) or whether it would make a difference.
I discovered that after reflection on Nuremberg that I am not a principled abolitionist: I think that the death penalty might be justified on grounds of retribution if it were applied in a nonracist way and without the distortions due to class bias. I wouldn't oppose seeing Kissinger or Cheney get the needle if they were convicted of crimes against humanity after a fair trail. (There is of course a very large question about whether the Nuremberg defendants got a fair trial.) But it's also possible that a society that's civilized enough to have the death penalty wouldn't want it.
--- "Mr. WD" <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/12/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> wrote:
>
> > But only 38% of Americans believe that the death
> penalty is applied
> > unfairly in this country today. A majority of 57%
> say that it is not.
> > Americans have actually become slightly more
> likely to say the death
> > penalty is applied fairly in the last several
> years, compared with
> > results from polls conducted in 2000 and 2002,
> during the height of
> > publicity surrounding state moratoriums on the
> death penalty.
>
>
> Last year I was speculating about why the death
> penalty was so popular
> in the U.S. Here's the crux of what I came up with:
>
>
>
http://thevanitywebsite.blogspot.com/2006/05/harsh-capitalism-harshest-punishment_30.html
>
> The foundational myth of the American sink-or-swim
> economy is that
> it's essentially a meritocracy. Maybe not a perfect
> meritocracy, but
> close. In the long run, the myth goes, everyone (or
> almost everyone)
> gets his just deserts; what people have -- or don't
> have -- they've
> earned. Material inequalities are fundamentally a
> function of an
> individual's moral steadfastness (his willingness to
> work) and
> cultivated talent... so goes the myth, anyway.
>
> This allows for only modest interventions in the
> economy: Since it's
> basically fair to begin with, the myth goes, all we
> need to do is
> attack those few stubborn pockets of unfairness and
> stay out of the
> way. Economic interventions, after all, are
> effectively admissions
> that the myth of the American economic meritocracy
> isn't entirely
> accurate -- that the economy isn't as fair as people
> say it is. The
> more robust the myth is, the easier it is to dismiss
> calls for
> economic interventions -- the myth keeps our markets
> free.
> ...
> This robust notion of responsibility is expansive
> and consistent: Rich
> people are responsible for being rich and poor
> people are responsible
> for being poor; and model citizens are responsible
> for being model and
> criminals are responsible for being criminals. And
> in each case, there
> is far more responsibility doled-out than the
> widely-recognized facts
> support: Many of the factors that make people who
> they are (for better
> or worse) are imposed on them by circumstances
> wholly beyond their
> control. Moreover -- and this is key -- the level of
> responsibility
> assigned in one sphere of social life, like
> economics, will correspond
> to the level of responsibility assigned in another
> sphere of social
> life, like criminal justice.
>
> In the United States, then, since we assign a great
> deal of
> responsibility to individuals for their economic
> success or failure,
> we also assign a great deal of responsibility to
> criminals for their
> crimes -- that is to say near complete
> responsibility.
>
> Here is where we come back to the death penalty. It
> typically takes a
> lot for a man to get to the point where he murders
> someone else.
> There's a reason, after all, why you don't hear a
> lot of stories about
> well-adjusted people killing others. People who end
> up on death row
> usually have serious mental health problems,
> substantial intellectual
> deficits, or unspeakably bad childhoods (and often a
> combination of
> two or more of these). As such, the "deliberative
> process" the typical
> death row inmate went through when he committed the
> murder(s) that
> landed him on death row would seem pretty alien to
> most of us, even
> though the law and prosecutors would like to suggest
> otherwise.
>
> But since murder is criminal and heinous, Americans
> feel obliged to
> assign responsibility to the murderer -- the same
> level of
> responsibility (although of a much different kind)
> they assign to the
> successful Harvard-educated CEO who was the son of a
> successful
> lawyer: full responsibility. And as I mentioned back
> in part I, full
> responsibility for a premeditated murder must be the
> forfeiture of
> one's own life, since life is the only good that
> cannot have an
> exchange value.
>
> The whole thing starts here:
>
http://thevanitywebsite.blogspot.com/2006/05/harsh-capitalism-harshest-punishment.html
>
> -WD
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Fussy? Opinionated? Impossible to please? Perfect. Join Yahoo!'s user panel and lay it on us. http://surveylink.yahoo.com/gmrs/yahoo_panel_invite.asp?a=7