Nevertheless, bullets are cheaper than career counselors.
With the exception of high profile politically motivated assassinations, where the victim becomes a rallying point for civil unrest, murdering your enemies tends to result in having fewer enemies. The world as a whole simply does not care enough about individual humans to invest its resources into rehabilitating criminals rather than punishing them. And when the humane solution would involve a complete overhaul of an entire economy, including improvements to the public education system, you're talking some real money.
Training up a few wildlife rangers and keeping them well stocked with bullets is a minimum viable solution for keeping the elephant herds alive long enough for the local economy to develop enough to make poaching for ivory obsolete. Re-education requires infrastructure that we take for granted in industrialized countries, but is simply not yet present in rural Africa, away from the cities.
Not even the U.S. can pull this off in its own backyard. Re-educate all you want, but if the guy still can't find a job good enough to pay his family after you finish, he'll go right back to growing weed, cooking meth, distilling moonshine, running guns, poaching ivory, or whatever other illegal thing that pays a month of wages or more in one score. And never mind re-education, if educating the first time isn't good enough for a decent job. How many people with a BA in History work in a restaurant or cafe or retail store for their living? Is an ex-con with a GED going to do any better?
Execution may be barbaric, but it produces immediate, visible results, which may be touted by politicians as "doing something about the problem." There's no way they would spring for a solution that would take at least a full generation to take hold, stress the treasury to the breaking point, and end up putting more power in the hands of the common people, rather than keeping it vested in the elites.
You can't rehabilitate just the criminal. You also have to rehabilitate all the circumstances that led to the crime. Otherwise, just as with killing, someone else steps in to fill the niche vacated by the ex-criminal.
Rehabilitation is an expensive solution, espoused by compassionate but impractical minds, for very complex problems.
I'm assuming that you're playing devil's advocate here, and that you don't actually agree with most of what you wrote.
>The world as a whole simply does not care enough about individual humans to invest its resources into rehabilitating criminals rather than punishing them.
The argument over capital punishment is a debate in the US, but not in many other countries.[1]
As of July 2015, of the 195 independent states that are UN members or have UN observer status:
-102 have abolished it for all crimes;
-7 have abolished, but retain it for exceptional or special circumstances (such as crimes committed in wartime);
-50 retain, but have not used it for at least 10 years or are under a moratorium;
-36 retain it in both law and practice.
The map on that Wikipedia entry should show you what esteemed company the US is in with regards to maintaining the death penalty.
>Not even the U.S. can pull this off in its own backyard.
Meghan J. Ryan, in her paper "Death and Rehabilitation"[2] discusses how, in the US, the threat of the death penalty is somehow considered to be a trigger for rehabilitation. A dangerous conflation if ever I saw one, and an article worth reading. I won't quote from it, as it discusses both sides of the argument, and I don't want to cherry pick. You should read it, while remembering that it discusses the topic from a uniquely American viewpoint.
>Training up a few wildlife rangers and keeping them well stocked with bullets is a minimum viable solution for keeping the elephant herds alive long enough for the local economy to develop enough to make poaching for ivory obsolete. Re-education requires infrastructure that we take for granted in industrialized countries, but is simply not yet present in rural Africa, away from the cities.
Regarding poaching, rehab has been proven to work[3]:
During training courses, even convicted poachers have been rehabilitated and sent out to work as rangers
These rangers were part of the problem, and are now part of the solution. If they had been killed, they wouldn't be part of anything. This also seems to show that the problem of training infrastructure in rural Africa is being solved, and that further efforts in this direction would have greater benefit.
Other than that, your argument seems to be that the problem is too large and too expensive. I argue that history has shown that we can, and should change our nature, and that killing isn't as cheap as you suggest.
With the exception of high profile politically motivated assassinations, where the victim becomes a rallying point for civil unrest, murdering your enemies tends to result in having fewer enemies. The world as a whole simply does not care enough about individual humans to invest its resources into rehabilitating criminals rather than punishing them. And when the humane solution would involve a complete overhaul of an entire economy, including improvements to the public education system, you're talking some real money.
Training up a few wildlife rangers and keeping them well stocked with bullets is a minimum viable solution for keeping the elephant herds alive long enough for the local economy to develop enough to make poaching for ivory obsolete. Re-education requires infrastructure that we take for granted in industrialized countries, but is simply not yet present in rural Africa, away from the cities.
Not even the U.S. can pull this off in its own backyard. Re-educate all you want, but if the guy still can't find a job good enough to pay his family after you finish, he'll go right back to growing weed, cooking meth, distilling moonshine, running guns, poaching ivory, or whatever other illegal thing that pays a month of wages or more in one score. And never mind re-education, if educating the first time isn't good enough for a decent job. How many people with a BA in History work in a restaurant or cafe or retail store for their living? Is an ex-con with a GED going to do any better?
Execution may be barbaric, but it produces immediate, visible results, which may be touted by politicians as "doing something about the problem." There's no way they would spring for a solution that would take at least a full generation to take hold, stress the treasury to the breaking point, and end up putting more power in the hands of the common people, rather than keeping it vested in the elites.
You can't rehabilitate just the criminal. You also have to rehabilitate all the circumstances that led to the crime. Otherwise, just as with killing, someone else steps in to fill the niche vacated by the ex-criminal.
Rehabilitation is an expensive solution, espoused by compassionate but impractical minds, for very complex problems.