The first killing starts in the mind, sometimes with hate, but sometimes with boredom or out of necessity. Humans have even killed because they were filled with love that could only be destructive, and because of revenge that came out of such love. Revenge seems to come from the kind of all consuming pain that loss of what is loved creates.

It is hidden by claims that one must kill out of necessity, that certain people don’t deserve to live, but no one has a right to make this claim.

The crowding of our nation’s prison system is a topic of much discussion because it circles around a greater issue - whether or not the state should morally be allowed to kill. Many people have justified the death penalty to themselves by arguing that our nation’s prisons are full of people for whom the state has to provide food and a place to sleep, but this practical argument can be dismissed in two ways.

First, the issue of overcrowding brings to mind the question of who is In prison and why. Currently, almost 1 in 4 persons who are in jail worldwide are incarcerated in America’s prisons, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. They also note that in 1999 alone incarceration for drug use tripled, and the rates of people behind bars for drug-related charges are constantly going up. For certain marijuana charges, a person can be incarcerated for up to 40 years. This is just one example of nonviolent offences clogging the nation’s prison system. The solution is not to kill those who are violent offenders, but to let people involved in nonviolent crimes such as drug abuse be involved in rehabilitation programs, rather than prison systems which do nothing to encourage users to quit.

Moreover, the argument that prisons are overcrowded fails to address the moral statement in question, that the government has a right to kill for justice, as true or false. If we live in a society where we believe killing is wrong, yet we yield tax money to a prison system that kills rather than rehabilitating, we cannot say we are being moral. There may be exceptions to the killing rule, but the state is never moral in sponsoring death. It sends a clear message that one human life can be exchanged for another when this is not the case.

Murdering a murderer brings back no victims, brings no peace to family members who have lost because such peace can only come from within.

Source: Beatty, Phillip, Holman, Barry and Schiraldi, Vincent. “Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States.” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 2000

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