JUSTICE

Getting back on track with sleep, I slept a whole five hours last night and am now filled with energy. I may not even nap before going to work, but I don't wanna get too crazy there.

My new favorite thing to do when driving is be passive aggressive. When someone is riding my ass and we aren't on the freeway I am careful to drive a safe three miles below the speed limit, it pleases me to think that they are frustrated and have no way to get around me.

So on the topic of doing stupid things for petty vengeance, the state of Arkansas has decided to kill a few folks all in a row before their drugs run out. By which I mean that the drugs they use for lethal injection are reaching their expiration date and it was literally a matter of "use them or lose them".

I have issues with the idea of state sponsored executions in general, that sounds weird when I read it out loud, like I would be happier if executions were handled by the free market or something, I'm not, because that would be terrible. The point is, I am even less in favor of them being rushed because some drugs might expire, I am perfectly comfortable with the condemned having to wait a long time, or possibly forever, before they are executed. I mean, I get that these guys committed crimes bad enough for the death penalty, and that they have presumably used up their appeals. but rushing to vengeance doesn't sit right with me.

And don't get me wrong, it is vengeance and not justice. Our system of punishment is only loosely related to justice really, the idea that criminals should be rehabilitated and returned to society is paid lip service sure, but you only have to read a reaction to a police shooting to see that killing people for crimes is perfectly palatable to the general population, and by extension the people who create the rules for crime and punishment. Once you are in the system it is assumed that you both deserve to be there as well as don't deserve anything good for the rest of your life.

Let's diverge into nerddom for a bit, Batman is often criticized for his villains basically never going away, Arkham has what amounts to a revolving door and the argument is that if he simply killed them, then the problem would stop. Ignoring the fact that nothing stays dead in comic books anymore, or if they do they just become undead or something. Those who advocate killing say, the Joker, have a worse grasp on morality than the average cop in the Gotham City Police Department, not an organization known for it's firm moral code by any stretch.

What Batman understands, and what these people don't, is that he isn't out to punish criminals. Or rather he is, but death isn't really a punishment and doesn't accomplish anything. Death is just vengeance, and vengeance isn't enough. The Joker doesn't care if you kill him, he would prefer it really, because it brings you closer to him, real justice is changing the criminal, and while the nature of comic books means that rarely happens permanently that is where we reach the differences between those and real life.
One of the more memorable portions of a Justice League story I read years ago involved a terribly powerful telepath using his powers to "fix" or adjust, the brains of Batman's various villains so that they, for a time, had the reactions and morality of an average person. His reaction upon seeing this was to say "I learned that I can still feel joy". This is because the various villains had realized what they had done was wrong and were appalled, in those moments they would have given anything to change what they had done, or to take it back, they knew it was wrong and unforgivable and if given the chance would have either taken their own lives or dedicated themselves forever to making up for it.

That is what brought Bats joy, and that is why killing people doesn't work, because it forever removes the opportunity for that to happen.

In real life of course we do not have super powerful brain altering telepaths... hopefully, and if we did it would be exceedingly creepy and invasive for them to do things like that, but the point remains that our criminal justice system is built almost exclusively to prevent people from rehabilitating, to remove the chance of the moment I described above from happening forever.

I am not a complete fool, I realize that under the best of circumstances not everyone can be rehabilitated, and that some crimes can never be made up for, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, if only one in one percent of those currently on death row could be rehabilitated then it's worth the effort, even if they never see freedom again they can make contributions, and we would forever remove the chance of killing innocent people for crimes they didn't commit, as well as stop turning state employees into murderers. It's probably a tradeoff worth making.