Essays - Capital Punishment is Our Best Solution for Unwanted Criminals
Have you been wondering where all our tax dollars are going to these days?
A large amount of it is going towards maintaining murderers, rapists and thieves,
and for what reason, to live the good life? The average prisoner costs the
federal government one hundred and fifty dollars a day which amounts to fifty-
three thousand four hundred dollars a year. Now, ask yourself this question, Is
it worth all this money to keep these savage criminals in jail? Do you really
want these brutal criminals after release from prison roaming freely in our
streets near our homes? The ultimate answer to these questions is only too
evident, we must control the situation, we need to enforce an alternative... we
need Capital Punishment.
For all of the murderers, thieves, drug lords, rapists and any other severe
law perpetrator, there must be some form of control and it must be capital
punishment. Any person who kills people with no regrets or rapes innocent
victims continuously, does not deserve to live in a luxurious North American
penitentiary or anywhere for that matter, they deserve nothing but the death
penalty. When the words ‘death penalty' or ‘capital punishment' are heard, they
obviously are disturbing and uncomfortable, but so are their crimes. There is
no hope for criminals with this kind of behavior and mentality. I believe that
capital punishment is the key necessity.
If capital punishment was enforced for severe crimes, it would eliminate a
fair amount of tax money going towards the judiciary system. If a prison were
to maintain a deadly criminal sentenced for life starting at the age of thirty
and living to seventy, it would cost tax payers an unbelievable amount of two
million one hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars. It is hard to believe but
it is true, and imagine, if that is the cost of just one criminal, imagine the
astronomical amount of five hundred criminals each costing that amount of
money... something must be done. Capital punishment would eliminate those
figures and leave you and me a whole lot happier.
When a murderer kills a person and goes to court, he expects to get around
thirty to fifty years in jail, and if he behaves well in prison, he could very
well get out in half the time. It is also a fact that after the criminal has
been released from prison, he will most likely perform the same acts that
rendered him there in the first place. Society can't handle these brutal
When reading ancient texts, they are often told through an omniscient point of view, such as The Odyssey or Gilgamesh, or they are written through another person’s perspective, such as The Republic. Confessions differs in that it is told from a first-person point of view, which makes it uniquely fascinating because we get to learn firsthand how Augustine’s actions, thoughts, and beliefs affected him. In comparison with the other, often mythical, texts, Augustine is a humanized perspective into the world—neither divine nor idolized; his story resembles that of many others as a man who grew to seek both conviction and resolution in his choices. The Confessions of Saint Augustine is, at its core, the journey of an everyman through his life—a concept not far removed from contemporary media. It is the culmination of his trials, tribulations, and efforts as a young man whose development influenced by the immense possibilities of the spiritual world that surrounded him.
This paper will outline specific points in Saint Augustine’s Confessions that highlight religious views following the fall of Rome. Though Augustines views on religion may not reflect that of most people in his time period, it still gives valuable insight into how many, namely Neoplatonists,, viewed God and his teachings.
Augustine. “Confessions”. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 1113-41. Print.
Cohen (1985) supports this sentiment, and suggests that community based punishment alternatives have actually led to a widening and expansion of the retributive criminal justice system, rather than its abolishment. The current criminal justice system is expensive to maintain. In North America, the cost to house one prisoner is upwards of eighty to two hundred dollars a day (Morris, 2000). The bulk of this is devoted to paying guards and security (Morris, 2000).
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine warns against the many pleasures of life. "Day after day," he observes, "without ceasing these temptations put us to the test" (245).[1] He argues that a man can become happy only by resisting worldly pleasures. But according to Aristotle, virtue and happiness depend on achieving the "moral mean" in all facets of life. If we accept Aristotle's ideal of a balanced life, we are forced to view Saint Augustine's denial of temptations from a different perspective. His avoidance of worldly pleasures is an excess of self-restraint that keeps him from the moral mean between pleasure and self-restraint. In this view, he is sacrificing balance for excess, and is no different from a drunkard who cannot moderate his desire for alcohol.
Born in the year 354 on African soil, Augustine spent his earlier years in the care of his Christian mother, Monnica. He spent his time blissfully living the life of any normal child; doing mischievous deeds and remaining apathetic to life’s worries. He despised Greek education, and by extension, those who attempted to mandate a need to obtain one. But not for superficial reasons, rather, Augustine’s animosity towards his instructors was related to irrelevant subjects taught in the schools. According to him, Greek instructors failed to adequately expound on topics that hold honest meaning. One was fiction, which Augustine found to be quite contradictory to one who hoped to escape the sin of lying. However, Augustine did give positive feedback on Greek scholar’s inst...
There is a new form of prisons called private prisons and they are costing more than just convict’s time
The poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen portrays the horrors of World War I with the horrific imagery and the startling use of words he uses. He describes his experience of a gas attack where he lost a member of his squadron and the lasting impact it had on him. He describes how terrible the conditions were for the soldiers and just how bad it was. By doing this he is trying to help stop other soldiers from experiencing what happened in a shortage of time.
Offenders given mandatory life in prison on charges of murder, on average only serve 16 years before being released back into society. One in three of these killers carries out a second murder even under the supervision of the probation officer.1 If we allow murderers to spend life in prison we run the chance of them getting out and killing again. Capital punishment can also deter future perpetrators from committing such a heinous crime, and it will end the prisoner’s suffering by giving them a humane death and give closure to the victim’s family. Without a concrete meaning of “life in prison” we need the death penalty to put an end to the most evil of people.
However, legalization will be profitable to global economies in two ways. It will allow for money spent on drug law enforcement to be spent more wisely and will increase revenue. There have been escalating costs spent on the war against drugs and countless dollars spent on rehabilitation. Every year in the United States, ten billion dollars are spent on enforcing drug laws alone. Drug violators accounted for about forty percent of all criminals in federal prisons (Rosenthal 1996). In 1989, a Republican county executive of Mercer County, N.J., estimated that it would cost approximately one
...ugustine about the human condition. Throughout life we are faced with many decisions both right and wrong, however the wrong option always seems more fun or better in someone even though we know its wrong. Something so basic like breaking the speed limit is a choice we know is wrong and could end it punishment but we do it anyway, because we just enjoy doing the wrong thing, its part of our human nature to do wrong. However in Augustine’s time there was no question that God existed, if you broke a law or sinned you where doing so against God, now if you sin or break a law, the human population focuses more on how the law will punish you, rather than how God will feel about it. Happiness and sin are two sides of the same coin, you cant achieve one without the other, and because of our human nature sinning and choosing false happiness will always “look’ better to us.
(Sharp, 1997) In attempting to find articles stating that the the death penalty is less expensive than life with out parole, I came across many more supporting it the other way around. There is no definite facts on the exact amount of money because each state is different in the pricing which lead to the finding out that in some states, the death penalty is much more expensive than life with out parole, but in other states, life without parole is the pricier option. It is shown that when comparing which is the more expensive choice, it is actually based on how much the tax payers are paying. This proves that life without parole is more expensive because tax payers are paying the same amount of money each year for the inmate. When there is not a death penalty and they do not get executed, the tax payers are paying yearly for how ever long the person is alive for vs the average 6 years that a person on death row is an inmate. (Phillips,
During the spring semester I read Evangelium Vitae: The Gospel of Life. Paragraphs 27 and 56 of this encyclical prompted a discussion of the death penalty with other students. Their first reaction was that the Pope was against it and that he was saying that the penalty has no justification. There was general resistance to the suggestion that while the Pope's attitude toward the death penalty is, to put it mildly, unfavorable, he did not flat out say that it was immoral, wrong, without justification.
probably done this before. I assume he will be put in jail for a little while,
Crime is everywhere. Wherever we look, we find criminals and crime. Criminals have become a part of our daily lives. Does this mean we let them be the darkness of our society? No, definitely not. Eliminating crime and criminals is our duty, and we cannot ignore it. Getting the rightly accused to a just punishment is very important. Some criminals commit a crime because they have no other option to survive, but some do it for fun. I do not advocate death penalty for everybody. A person, who stole bread from a grocery store, definitely does not deserve death penalty. However, a serial killer, who kills people for fun or for his personal gain, definitely deserves death penalty. Death penalty should continue in order to eliminate the garbage of our society. Not everybody deserves to die, but some people definitely do. I support death penalty because of several reasons. Firstly, I believe that death penalty serves as a deterrent and helps in reducing crime. Secondly, it is true that death penalty is irreversible, but it is hard to kill a wrongly convicted person due to the several chances given to the convicted to prove his innocence. Thirdly, death penalty assures safety of the society by eliminating these criminals. Finally, I believe in "lex tallionis" - a life for a life.