Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates
independent.co.uk
“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
You are viewing a single comment
Gruesome.
I'm not convinced the death penalty is worthwhile except to feed someone's wrath.
What if, (and hear me out,) we did for corrections the sort of thing that countries with low recidivism do? Like, not use for-profit prisons with incentive to turn out re-offenders, and not use prisons that turn out hardened criminals that aren't equipped to function in the world without resorting to crime, and actually take the 'corrections' or 'rehabilitation' parts of their nomenclature seriously?
If all we do with our prisons is punish and humiliate (and squeeze slave labor out of) convicts, we're just creating future crime and all that's left at that point is killing convicts at industrial pace unless you can figure out that crime is more driven by poverty than anything else, and the USA just doesn't want to figure that out because it just doesn't want to solve poverty or crime, it wants to make money creating and punishing both.
It is seriously incredible that in the United States prisons are for profit. Healthcare and water are for profit too...
Only 8 percent of US prisoners are in for profit prisons. This is definitely a problem, but it's not the main problem with our justice system, by any means. The way we focus on punishment instead of rehabilitation is a bigger problem than the fact that for profit prisons exist. I mean, getting rid of for profit prisons is a start, but the whole thing needs reform.
The cruelty (and profit it generates) is the point
It's not just the prison system that's fucked. It's society in general.
A former prisoner will always be shunned. No matter if rehabilitated or not, people will always fear a former prisoner (at least in cases of brutality or sexuality) and often even former accused people. That also makes the whole system absurd. If people don't trust in rehabilitation and therefore always push former criminals away and back into one corner or another, we might as well continue/intensify killing them right away; society decided that there is no way back, so why bother. And that sucks.