[lbo-talk] Death penalty (was: Singapore)

[Chris Sturr]

This may have come up already in this thread, but what bugs me about many
anti-death penalty activists/strategies is that they often take the death
penalty out of the context of the rest of the criminal justice system.
Sometimes they just fail to draw the obvious connections between the racism
of how the death penalty is applied and the racism throughout the system,
or between the fallibility of the system in the case of capital cases and
its fallibility across the board. But even worse, sometimes they seem to
contribute to mass incarceration and the prison crisis (or to the
ideological climate that underwrites these) by narrowly focusing on
defeating the death penalty, e.g. when they argue for life without
possibility of parole as an alternative to the death penalty or otherwise
take as much as a "tough on crime" stance as they can while still opposing
the death penalty. The whole approach focuses on the tiny proportion of the
millions of people in prison or jail who are on death row, and sometimes
throws the rest of the prisoners under the bus.

-- 
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Chris Sturr
Co-editor, *Dollars & Sense*
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