Executing Criminals...Is this the answer to Crimewaves?

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It is understandable that so many of our so-called 'good people' expound executions as the way to deal with serious crime of violence.

It is supprising that so many of those who advocate mainland China's system of capital punishment, would have in the past said that they hated the Chinese system of politics for its deeply Communist origins, yet they now feel that the Chinese system is the answer to serious crime.

Is it simply that most of us do not understand the real causes of serious crime, so we feel that the answer to serious criminal activity, violence and murder, is to kill the criminal?

Let us be honest and admit that deep down, we know that most of the perpetrators of our worst criminal acts are seriously mentally disturbed, or in fact even 'mad'.

How do we know that violent criminal activity is in fact a form of madness?

Simply because we can all see that the modus operandi employed in the crimes screams serious mental disturbance or 'madness' at us!

Our society and justice system are not now geared up to dealing with the 'madness' that produces such crime, if they ever were.

It is significant that violent criminal behaviour burgeons during times of economic depression, and that at such times,societies are even less enclined to spend what is needed, to realign the psyches of those who have been socially stressed into mental disturbance.

To a large extent, it is the 'them and us' attitudes of a society that prevents it from seeing that it is not individuals that need healing, but the collective society itself.

Thus, faced with more and more serious crime, society raises the bar so that fewer and fewer criminals can qualify to be delt with by the courts as being under a mental dissability. Rather than build up facilities for dealing with the various degrees of mental dissability and trauma that so many in our society are exhibiting, we simply keep incarcerarting those whose symptoms are manifest in serious crime, thinking that the more incarcerations we achieve, the safer our society will be. As crime worsens, many start to advocate that we kill
our 'offenders'.

It is much easier to call our 'mad', bad, then incarcerate them hoping that the  penal system will kill them for us, or at least keep them out of sight and sound of us.

Of course recognising that criminals are 'sad' not 'bad' is not popular as it pre-supposes that the 'victims' of crime will be denied 'just retribution' if criminals are treated, rather than punished.

It is obvious to the observer, that court judges, see the failure of the punitive system, and that many try in their own way to inject some sanity and compassion into their findings and sentencing, usually to be condemned by a wave of High Court appeals and public castigation.

So how does all of this take us back to the 'executions' and the Chinese justice system?

As a model that is said to work, the Chinese system bears little scrutiny.

The Chinese execute more and more every year, yet the number of murders does not abate.

Some would even suggest that the death sentence for criminal activity injects a desperation and psychological preparedness to kill during the commission of even relatively minor crimes, in the knowledge that one might just as well be executed, 'for a sheep as a lamb'.

Such systems do not hold out much hope for survival for the criminal or the mentally 'impaired'.

In our own society, where such a high proportion of our members are only just managing to stay on the straight and narrow through the use of prescription anti-depressants or 'calmatives' (including many in all of our professions), and our social and economic pressures are bound to produce more business failures, mortgage sales, relationship breakups, alcoholism and drug-addiction, it will soon be revealed if we have a criminal under-class who were simply born bad, or if more of the so-called 'good people' fall into criminal behaviour.
It could be that there will not be enough spare shipping containers in the world to incarcerate all of our 'criminals'.
How naive are we as a society to think of ourselves as individuals who are "alright Jack!' and can continue to survive as somehow seperate to those around us who are being so injured by the society we are all making?

Unless we can have fewer prisons, more treatment centres and a philosophy which ceases to deal in 'individuals' (them and us) the planet will be quite justified in minimising humanity through global warming or any other cosmic means.

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