Reply #99: One of the charges often made against liberals

[Katzenjammer]

is that liberals care more about the perp than about the victim. I think it's often a fair beef.

I'm opposed to the dp. I used not to be, but as I've grown older, my views have changed in complicated ways. So now I'm opposed to the dp. But perhaps only because it's irreversible and applied in a racist, classist way. If those factors were completely corrected, I think I might be okay with it. Or maybe not.

So okay, instead of killing these malefactors, we lock them up. We spend more than the price of a university education on them, and we do it over and over again for perhaps many decades.

What do we do for the victims and their families? Nothing. A few states have meager "victim compensation" funds that provide some money, but the damage victims suffer is vast and lasting. We don't deal with that. We don't even want to know about it.

The bottom line is that we spend far more to warehouse the perp than we do restoring the life of the victim or their family. There's something deeply disgusting about that, to my mind.

So, awful as it might seem, I don't have a lot of problem with putting someone who has committed a vicious, ideological crime into permanent solitary. They got to keep their life, so what more do they want--a medal?

If in solitary they lose whatever ability they had to fool people into thinking they're not the psychopaths they are, exactly how big a loss is that anyway?

Maybe the rule should be that the perp gets nothing until the victims are truly made whole again?