There was a book published many years ago by the name: “The Crime of Punishment”.  It was an attack on the unfair and badly overseen way criminals are put through an antique and horrendous system of “criminal justice”.  A report today about closing a girls “reformatory” in Mississippi is bracketed by another story about Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens who renounces the death penalty.  These two commentaries on punishment with the severest being the death penalty rise to the top of the many reports about extra-legal implementation of punishment for crimes not yet brought into court for decisions.  “Police brutality” is the usual complaint along with the accusation that a crime was committed.  Somewhere, somehow, the real meaning or order in society has become perverted and broken.

Take, for instance, the fundamentalist Mormon break-away church of the Latter Day Saints in Texas.  That bundling of family members accused of marrying off young girls for the purpose of “multiplying” and fulfilling God’s commandment produced the horror of taking hundreds of children away from their families and now housed and sequestered away from their families.  Can the Texas government become the parents of those children and specifically will punishment be meted out and by whom and when and to what degree? There are many kinds of deaths.

I think that the death penalty or penalty by death is a non-sequitor.  Plans have been advanced over the years to use the labor of convicted murderers and persons who plot and carry out terror against a government or the people who live in it.  It would be so much better without causing pain to such individuals to use their labor for the rest of their lives to help those they harmed.  It would be a social good rather than the reiteration of the tooth for a tooth and life for a life formula that has survived throughout the ages.

We handle the death penalty (we meaning the people who support the death penalty) in various ways. There is a sticking point in its constitutionality - that the death must be humane and avoidance of giving pain to the prisoner. The attempt is to accomplish this with the latest improvement in “lethal injections”.  There are problems with hanging, firing squads, smothering, gas, garroting, The Electric Chair and, I suppose, the adherents of the death penalty will come up with other life ending procedures.

It is wrong to take a life and worse to take another in retribution.  Each case should be studied for means of preventing a future similar crime but the end should NOT be the death penalty.  That is the crime of punishment.  We commit murder to end murder.  And, it does not work. Then, too, let WAR be NO MORE.