The governor of Arkansas has announced that his state plans to execute eight men, two a day, over a span of 10 days next month.  How, I wonder, is this spate of executions different in Arkansas than from the areas controlled by ISIS?  Because I was born in Arkansas and lived there until I was in my early teen years, I feel a kinship to the state and to the people who live there.  When I was a graduate school student I was married, and Margaret and I had our wonderful son David already.  I worked at night in San Quentin Prison and was sometimes assigned to work in that part of the prison known as “Death Row.”  This writing is not about that experience, but I should interject here that my life was changed by working in a maximum security prison.  What this writing is about is the absurdity of the death penalty as a response to the most awful crimes committed in our society, even murder.  Killing someone deliberately, however humanely it is done, is simply wrong.  There is no argument that can be made that makes sense.  Taking a life, snuffing it out, to punish someone for doing some awful crime, doesn’t make sense; and killing someone so that doing it keeps other people from committing murder is a ridiculous argument. It doesn’t make sense.  I have talked with death row inmates, sometime for hours when there was nothing else to do in the middle of a San Quentin night, and I haven’t heard anything from those men who were condemned to die that persuaded me that killing them made any sense at all. Don’t misunderstand me. Some of those people were awful. Some of them were mean, horrible people, but no amount or degree of meanness does anything to deter commitment of murder in our culture by killing the killers. I remember Richard Harmon who was executed in 1959 because he had killed someone.  He wasn’t a “bad” man.  He could have been a useful member of society. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the men I knew at San Quentin was Caryl Chessman, a convicted robber, kidnapper and rapist who was sentenced to death for a series of crimes committed in January 1948 in the Los Angeles area.  He was the “first modern American executed for a non-lethal kidnapping.”  He was not a nice guy but we were no safer on the streets of California the days after his death than we were before it.

The L.A. Times today included an story about how some people are treated better after their conviction than others.  The report is not about the death penalty, but it makes the point that 

our treatment of criminals is based on a generally unfair assumption.  Take a look to see how some people who are sentenced to prison are treated:  http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pay-to-stay-jails/