Politics vs the death penalty

At one point in my life I was for the death penalty. That was until I was up to be on a jury where the death penalty was going to be addressed. I took one look at the person charged and even with a rash judgment that this person may have committed a heinous crime, who was I really to decide the fate of another person's life.

This issue comes up every now and then, and unfortunately it falls under the liberal vs conservative political spectrum instead of what can we do better as a society.

Liberals/democrats argue against the death penalty, but for the wrong reasons, some are noble, but to really accomplish something we need to address root causes.

And the crime and punishment aspect is where conservatives fail. I know many people nowadays don't want to hear a moral argument about right to life, so lets try something more basic. And it comes from the basic and well known phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Too often we decide that punishment should be based on deterrence, and use that as the idea of prevention. This is way too short sighted. The real solution is to work to create a better society so people don't commit heinous crimes, sure this may take more work, but the alternative is to decide, as if we are God, whose life to take and whose to not. I ask you, go look at yourself in the mirror and answer(HONESTLY) what right do I have to pass judgment on another human being. Even if you don't believe in God, go ask yourself that question. And if you were to answer yourself honestly and have any sense of respect for yourself and humans in general you will realize why the death penalty should not be the answer to preventing heinous crimes.

The Death penalty is an easy answer to a horrible situation. The better answer though takes real work,but wouldn't it be better to have a society that respects life first than to make arbitrary judgments on people's lives.

Many conservatives feel the death penalty and punishment as a deterrence is the answer, so how does a person get conservatives that feel this way to realize a better answer is needed. Conservatives want our government to tax us less ( and me too), but always choose solutions that cost us as a society more in the long run.Does anyone truly believe our prison system is working? Our prison system is becoming a highly expensive failure of deterrence. Liberals throw tax money at our problems with answers that solve for the day, not to get ahead of the problem to prevent it. The liberals spend money under the idea of lets give someone a fish, feeding for the day, but never touch on how to teach people how to fish so they don't need constant help. And worse no one has an answer to really rehabilitate criminals.


And if you noticed I used two phrases well used by conservatives, ounce of prevention... and give a man a fish, feed for day,, teach to fish, feed for lifetime,,, but I and say this with emphasis, two phrases not followed well by conservatives when it comes to actually doing something about the problems in our society. We, as conservatives, fail to truly be conservative. If you prevent the problem, even if it seems the cost up front is high, then you are not stuck with the cost of failing which is always higher. And in the case of the death penalty, puts us in the position of deciding who should live and who shouldn't. And if you think you can make this decision, well you really need to think about who you think you are. Frankly I only like playing God in my dreams and even that only on Tuesday.

The ounce of prevention is starting with children, and this means working against environments that we as a society let get created where poverty, desperation, frustration,horrid education, lack of values, run rampant in our country, (and lack of values is not only in areas of poverty, our whole society is filled with a lack of values)and to start teaching a new generation the value of positive influence and decision making. And then so many non God believing liberals deride the concept of family values and a sense of morality that comes from God, yet they don't have a solution to base our society doing right. And putting both together we get failure of us to get to a point where we don't need to worry about the death penalty at all. And we end up using politics to not solve a very important issue of who we are as a society.

As a conservative, I feel we need to step up and work to solve our problems such as events that lead people to lose respect of life so much so they commit heinous crimes. This is the real solution and once we can do that we are taking a step forward in calling ourselves a civilized society.