“Murderer wins stay of execution”
read the bold print on the front page of Valley & State a couple weeks back. I had previously heard it was being postponed due to difficulty obtaining one of the three drugs we combine to pull off an execution. Somebody help me to understand my cultures priorities and decisions regarding allocations of MY and YOUR monies.
Correct me if I’m wrong but don’t people drop dead daily from accidental overdoses over doses from a variety of individual prescription and recreational drug usage?
Why do we require 3 specific (apparently hard to get hard to get) chemicals when one injection of any number of common drugs would induce immediate and painless (merciful) death? Along with so many other current government decisions, I just don’t get it!
I also don’t get how we continue to support the costs of maintaining (and building new) prisons over our support of
schools. It costs anywhere between 27 and 40 thousand dollars a year average to imprison a convicted criminal in Arizona. We allocate 6 to 7 thousand dollars per year towards our childrens educations. What is wrong with this picture? How about ..Everything!
How many honest out of work and working Americans with families to support
would kill (figure of speech and pun intended) to be receiving that amount of money from the government.
Yet we continue to house many dangerous, dishonest, self serving, law breaking convicts at the cost of education..education-you know, that stuff that prepares you to make an Honest living and become a productive member of a healthy society.
I hear that guards have a pretty strong union and evidently prisons have persuasive lobbying power. What do they do with all that money? I know that guards are paid better than teachers in many school districts around the country. Do you have to go to graduate school to become a prison guard? I don’t know. I doubt you need college or even high school to qualify for the rigors of jail keeping.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating or supporting the death penalty. However, I am totally against providing anything but the barest of necessities and comforts for to the ner’do wells who are serving time for breaking the laws the rest of us choose to follow. Prison should be a punishment, especially if it is to work as a deterrent to future crime.
But many of the inmates are more secure, better provided for and content living in a prison culture than out there in the “real” world. I am not without compassion. I know that many if not all crime is the result of unspeakable neglect and violent emotional and physical abuse perpetrated upon children who later grow up to do the same to others.
But unless we design a rehabilitation program that actually works, I vote for a sentence of hardship, void of television, work out equipment, sports, deserts and the like. Maybe if prisons weren’t so comfy less people would be willing to risk going there.
Then maybe we’d have a little more money available for schooling young people and giving them the amenities that would better prepare them as productive adults who contribute to society instead of becoming yet another low priority casualty of the congressional debates over where “our” money goes..
4/23/11
