1. What is your stance on abolishing the death penalty? Are you in favor or not?
2. Do you think that voters in general are informed enough on the ballots up for voting at the time of voting? If not, why?
3. What can be done to improve the public's knowledge of the propositions on the ballot?
1. I do support prop 34. With the probability of saving the state $1 billion in 5 years and a portion of those funds, $100 million, dedicated to solve more rape and murder cases, the prop has strong appeal. I would love to see the money saved to go towards education, but if it is purely saved, that would be fine as well. Also, I see death as the easy way out. With prop 34, inmates will have to work and pay restitution to the victim's compensation fund throughout their lifetime sentence. That definitely seems more just.
2. I do not think they are. Here's why based on my personal experience. I voted in 2008 and the only thing I knew was that I was voting for Obama. Everything else on there was new to me. So sad to say, I voted on everything else without truly knowing the issues behind them and ended up realizing later on that my vote on certain things would have been different if I had known more about what was on there. The reason I didn't know much about these things were because I didn't take the time to look at them or research them.
3. One way to improve the public's knowledge is to bring a flyer to people's doors a month before voting. On this flyer there should be all the propositions that they'll be voting on and what they're about. Just the basics. And links under each of them where people can look up if they want to find out more. This way, there will be some understanding beforehand.
-Carl
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
ReplyDelete- Gandhi
Wise words, Mr Mortimer
ReplyDelete1. What is your stance on abolishing the death penalty? Are you in favor or not?
ReplyDeleteIn favor of it
2. Do you think that voters in general are informed enough on the ballots up for voting at the time of voting? If not, why?
Because they didn't do research or were not informed on it
3. What can be done to improve the public's knowledge of the propositions on the ballot?
More exposure to it such as using the media
A large portion of government spending goes to correctional facilities (Avg: $34,000 per prisoner). They get healthcare, exercise, food, access to a library, psychologists, and a place to sleep. Given that the conditions are poisoned by other dangerous people, prisoners definitely have it a lot better than a majority of the world living in poverty searching for their next meal or drink.
ReplyDeleteyou talk as if they have it so good in there; "healthcare, exercise, food, access to libary...etc" and as if livng with other prisoners is just a very small thing they have to worry about, but the truth is that they have to watch their back when they eat and sleep, and have to be threatened with violence every day. I don't believe that they have it better than the majority of the world living in poverty. They would give up all in order to have their freedom again just because of how they have to stress about defending themselves every single day from other prisoners.
DeleteI would take away the death penalty. shit costs too much ( over 1 million) to kill someone. also i am in favor of their idea of creating a way for the inmate to work off their sentence. this way the tax payers wont be paying all that money to keep the inmate in jail. from other articles i have read people in jail get too many benefits, and some go there to stay live if they are homeless/ poor. anyways back to your question, i also think its inhumane to intentionally kill someone, even if that person is getting death because they killed someone.
ReplyDeleteFor the truth, go to http://waitingforjustice.net
ReplyDeleteI'm going to say that cannibalism should be OK'd in place of the death penalty. Instead of being just executed, you are used as food for other prisoners. (would probably need to change the execution method to guillotine or some such, that doesn't have poison).
ReplyDeleteNow this will cause some externality effect, economically and socially. Hopefully, it will deter people from committing future crime (though, people who are really disturbed wouldn't care). By feeding other inmates with executed inmates, they would probably think otherwise to do crime again (maybe have a restriction on who gets fed human or not? more serious crime, human food; petty crime, regular food). This will allow a rotation of food supply to offset some cost. Maybe limiting a person to a certain amount of years only to be on death row? to expediate the cannibalistic food chain. Now this might cause mad cow disease-like thing in human because of consumption of its own kind? Who knows.
But all jokes aside,
Death penalty has its place in our legal system. It's a different matter if we're talking about the "humane" way of dealing with the inmates as that is a moral issue. The gallows or firing squad is fine in my opinion. The issue at hand is intertwined with culture issues we have though. There are many things we should be looking at if we have to talk about death penalty.