The World's Longest Suicide Note (Part 4) 5/3/2010

My friend CC brought up the religious objection to suicide. Hume argues what I always thought was the best argument against this objection.

... Shall we assert, that the Almighty has reserved to himself, in any peculiar manner, the disposal of the lives of men, and has not submitted that event, in common with others, to the general laws, by which the universe is governed? This is plainly false. The lives of men depend on the same laws as the lives of all animals; and these are subjected to the general laws of matter and motion....

Allowing us criminals the ability to choose suicide, would that mean religious objections would be unconstitutional? Just as governmental forcing of suicide could not be allowed on several grounds, governmental forbidding of suicide should also be objectionable. And consider Hume's point here:

... and his voluntary death is equally advantageous to society, by ridding it of a pernicious member.

I guess I can accept the description of pernicious.

What troubles me more are those who think this option ought to be disallowed, but not on religious grounds. To say euthanasia allows us to escape our just punishment smacks of state-sponsored sadism. If that is any reason for our system of penal laws, then do we wonder why we keep increasing our criminal class and our prison populations? Is state-sponsored sadism proper in a Christian nation? Think about all this. I have done so for a very long time.

Why does the federal criminal justice system favor punishment over reformation? 

Where I have been is a re-entry and pre-trial detention facility. I do think I am seeing the baddest of the bad let alone the worst of the worst. Three others here face similar charges to me, and are very much white collar types, and all look forward to a decade and a half in prison.  What do the people of the United States think they are getting for these sentences?

What i am seeing is the result of getting tough on crime. Do the taxpayers know what they are getting, voting for politicians ranting about being tough on crime? What is the opposite of being tough on crime? Why if we have been getting tough on crime we have gone from potheads to meth heads, that gangbangers can be found in Muncie and Anderson, that we have more and more people in prison?

About all left for us to do is to pump gas through the showers. Do we want to go that far? I would like to point out our drug war led to all the cartel murders going on right now in Mexico.

[To be continued.]

sch

[Whew... I agree with what I wrote while thinking I was barely coherent. I found some sentences made no sense to me, and I will admit trying to make them sense without trying to change my syntax. In 2010, I was a bit of a tourist in a system I should have known better, one I was very ignorant of and of which I had never taken any interest, and it was quite an education. I entered it purposefully, albeit one I planned not to enjoy. When one pts himself into a position for which he thinks there can and will be only solution, his suicide, only to learn his plans will cause more harm to others than to himself, he starts paying attention to what he has done to himself. No, I think myself even more certain that the criminal justice system harms people. I cannot say it did so to me, other than letting me live. I say this about what it does, and did, to other people. It is a fraud draining tax money, a fraud perpetuated by politicians and bureaucrats by scaring the hell out of taxpayers. Being tough on crime is the exact opposite, when being tough translates into warehousing human being beings for decades and decades without giving them the means to change their behaviors and economic potential which led to their crimes. It is a fraud because the prison industrial system becomes a self-perpetuating system for the support of politicians, correctional officers and their unions, all those supplying goods and services to prisons, not a system mean to prevent crime as it is sold to the public. I furthered my education, starting with my pre-trial detention, which makes me a rarity, I think, in the prison community. sch 10/18/22.]