1153 Extreme Penalties

One of the concepts ushered in by The Enlightenment was penal reform. Before that penalties were harsh: torture and execution were the primary sentences because there weren’t prisons simply because they weren’t practical, except debtors’ prisons where people who owed money worked off their debt. The idea of rehabilitation wasn’t even considered. Liberalism changed all that but extreme penalties still persist: 3 Strikes, mandatory sentencing & civil forfeiture are examples; there are even prominent people calling for the execution of Fentynl-maker CEOs. Other examples: they execute drug traffickers in several nations and there are no drugs there; and there are nations where women are stoned if they have premarital sex, and there's not a lot of premarital sex there; there’s even a nation that imprisons people for chewing gum, and you know there's no gum chewing there. There are some very concerning trends: in one year, 10,000 more arrest warrants were given out in Ferguson, MO, a Black community, than there were people, and prisoners are being made to pay the cost of their incarceration. This may be why so many imprisonable offenses make no sense: drug use? Driving violations? White collar crime? Instead penalties could be house arrest, fines or suspend driver’s licenses. Unfortunately, staying home & fines don’t change people’s behavior, and what to do with people who don’t pay the fine? A quarter of all drivers drive without licenses now.