[Buddha-l] Re: Buddhist social deconstruction

[jkirk]

Dan makes some persuasive points. I see the issue of prison also in the 
light of repeat child rapers and molesters, pedophiles in a word.
Compassion for such as they IMHO is prison for life, so that they have no 
chance to incur further bad consequences to their moral life, nor 
opportunities to injure others, by repeating.
Where I live there are men who continue to try to lure or snatch kids 
walking home from school into their trucks or cars. These people when caught 
should be taken off the roads and off the map.
It's well known that such people cannot be "cured." It's been tried by 
various means and it fails.
Joanna
===================================================




> Curt wrote:
>
>> In Major Edict #5 Asoka
>> praises the "officers of the Dhamma" for their work on behalf of
>> prisoners - gaining the release of prisoners who have children or are
>> aged, and looking after prisoners who are well behaved (see
>> http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/asoka1.html).
>
> One has to know something about the customs of the times to recognize that
> this is a very measured, and indeed restrictive stipulation. It was common
> in China as well as India to offer major amnesties on regular occasions -- 
> annually or on certain years (e.g., every seventh year), or to coordinate
> with certain festivals or astrological/astronomical events, etc. In Pillar
> Edict 5 (which can be found on the same site), it says:
>
> "In the period [from my consecration] to [the anniversary on which] I had
> been consecrated twenty-six years, twenty-five releases of prisoners have
> been made."
>
> So it was an annual event, on the anniversary of his "consecration" (=
> coronation), an act of mercy believed to help insure continued rule (it 
> had
> cosmological as well as political dimensions). What "Major Edict #5" shows
> is that these annual gestures of amnesty where not universal (he didn't
> empty the prisons), but selective -- the old and infirm (who were now
> physically harmless) and well-behaved breadwinners whose families needed
> them for survival (there was no welfare system to pick up the slack). In
> short, these were selective releases (some rulers did virtually empty 
> their
> prisons on certain pressing occasions).
>
> The idea that prisons are unnecessary is naive, and dangerous. The idea 
> that
> inflicting dangerous predators on a defenseless populace is an act of
> compassion is perverse. The idea that a kiss on the cheek and a mantra 
> will
> extirpate dangerous criminal tendencies from all criminals is, itself,
> criminal.
>
> If you've never had a conversation with someone that you quickly realize 
> is
> willing and able to kill you right there on the spot should the merest 
> shift
> in wind or mood strike him, a realization that makes you tremble to your
> depths, then you are not in a position to fully appreciate what is at 
> stake.
>
> The necessity of prisons is not to be conflated with:
> 1. issues of false imprisonment,
> 2. substandard prison conditions,
> 3. overly harsh sentencing (or the obverse)
> 4. police brutality and corruption
> and the plethora of other issues that clear thinking people would wish to
> curtail and reform.
>
> It is about those people who have done horrible, unimaginable things, and
> will do them again, next time perhaps to someone you know.
>
> When I was in Britain about a year and half ago, the big news was some
> fellow who had massacred his wife and family and, once he had served his 
> ten
> years (!) had been released, marrying some woman who had become interested
> in him while he was in prison. It was current news because he had just
> massacred wife #2, apparently in a brutal fashion similar to what he had
> done to his previous, deceased wife. While the talking heads on tv were
> defending the idea that the release after the ten year sentence was
> justified (for similar reason to the ones floated on this list), the 
> second
> wife's surviving brother was hardly in agreement. My compassion melds with
> his outrage. I wasn't in Britain long enough to learn the final 
> disposition
> of the new crime. (incidentally, this coincided with the slaughter of the
> children in the Chechnyan school -- which the British journalists were too
> PC to label an act of "terrorism," a terminological hesitance that a panel
> reviewing the BBC's practices has recently highlighted for criticism
> http://www.bbcgovernors.co.uk/docs/reviews/panel_report_final.pdf  ). A
> squeamish incapacity to deal with violent people, masked by the 
> reassurance
> that this incapacity was a sign of high moral sensibilities. Interesting,
> but dangerous.
>
> Dan Lusthaus
>
>
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