Crime and punishment

Last night, Michael Portillo on the programme Horizon conducted an investigation to test whether there was any genuinely humane way to kill someone. Once upon a time, there were plenty of people who wanted to do that to him, humanely or otherwise. He, though, was referring to the death penalty, in which he believed that if it was applied, then it should be applied in a painless way for the condemned person. Lethal injection required the use of doctors for proper administration of the chemicals, but doctors, according to their Hippocratic oath to preserve life, don't go anywhere near the procedure, hence technicians have to do it and they can be sloppy, being not fully trained in medicine. Plus, there were questions over some of the chemicals used. Then the noose came under examination. But it was unreliable, unless it took off the head entirely, which is a bit gory. Then the electric chair, which was horrific. Finally, the last method of execution used (in the USA) was suffocation in a gas chamber, but that too was painful. The guillotine strangely was not mentioned. So Portillo turned to aeronautics - g-force and depressurisation, the latter which made him feel euphoric, even as he edged before death before being pulled back. He found an economical way of implementing that, from prior use on pigs.
He presented his findings to the leading advocate of the death penalty in the USA, who was massively unimpressed. He told Portillo that the death penalty must involve pain because the victim (assumed murder victim) would have felt pain. For the prisoner to feel euphoric as he passed away would insult the victim's memory. The advocate used the idea of a person being killed with a hammer to the head (because like, duh, all murders are like that) to show that the victim suffered gruesome pain (because like, duh, all murders involve hideous pain). Portillo's argument that the state should not emulate the murderer because then where is the difference did not wash with advocate, who was hostile from the outset. The advocate's rationality was clouded by vengeance. Vengeance should be absent from judicial procedure. What would the advocate made of a person's (or family member's) ability to forgive?
Dostoevsky said, from the viewpoint of one who had spent many years in a Siberian prison camp, you can measure how civilised a society is by how it treats its prisoners. Inmates have every detail of their lives under control, so how does society want them treated? I think Dostoevsky was airing a false hope. There will always be people who support the death penalty (with pain), just as their will always be people who oppose it, no matter how far society evolves, because it is in their character. Vengeance is a powerful motivator to seek the death of others and some people are more vengeful than others. It's perhaps amazing that the death penalty is abolished in the EU and Russia, just as much as it is still in force in Japan and most of the USA, given the essential characteristics of people.
I favour the denial of liberty over the seizure of life because I believe that, though not everyone can be rehabilitated, some should be given the chance. Those who cannot be trusted back in society should be prohibited from it and remain in prison. The number of executions in the USA are negligible compared to the size of the prison system - killing convicts won't free up prison spaces. Prison serves three purposes - punishment through denial of liberty, the protection of society from the criminals and the rehabilitation of criminals so that they can re-enter society and not reoffend. The brutalising of prisoners inside, the 'prison works' beloved of right-wingers, is counter-productive, is not meant to be part of the punishment, because since society allows it to happen, the prisoner feels they have no stake in such a society and on release (since most prison terms have an expiry date), they are more likely to commit a crime in society because they have no investment in that society. Therefore, if brutalism occurs, prison doesn't work, it fails. It explains why Britain has some of the highest recidivist rates in the western world.

As for cruelty, it seems the Japanese sent their whaling fleet to the south seas after all and hoped no-one would notice. Some green groups did and managed to board one of the whalers, though two protesters were captured and thrown in the brig. For the Japanese government, howver, to use the language of terrorism to describe the green campaigners is dishonourable and inaccurate and will no doubt be received with derision amongst its peers. The boarders may be eco-pirates (whether they had pitiful amounts of acid on them or not), but terrorists? It's as ridiculous as claiming these whaling missions are for scientific purposes.