New Reasons For Reopening Debate On Executing Killers [Updated]

Summary: Circumstances have changed since most Western countries and many American states abolished capital punishment. Sudden effacement of many key safeguards which bolstered those anti-death penalty policies demands that the conscientious reopen the debate over the need for executions of society's worst killers.

This article that appeared in the Brisbane Times (h/t Wretchard at the Belmont Club) , tells of heightened threats to public safety being recognized and seriously confronted by prison authorities. The new threat arose due to concerted efforts of radical immans to convert to Islam the most unsavory of the incarcerated in the New South Wales prison populations. The story provides more than sufficient evidence that many premises that guaranteed general public safety and were heretofore key to Western civilizations' inclination to abolish capital punishment have become perilously thin and penetrable.

Update 4/28/07:
Saudis Arrest 172 in Alleged Terror Plot . Pertinent to the commentary below is this excerpt The militants also planned to storm Saudi prisons to free jailed militants, the ministry's statement said. Do you suppose the Saudis used Western standard interrogation techniques to break up this threat?

Commentary

Time and again obstructionists to capital punishment have argued that the incarceration of murderers is all that is needed to remove their threat to society. "Life in prison without the possibility of parole" they say is sufficient to protect society from new threats from these monsters.

There are a number of other arguments that partly defeat this premise -- such as the presence of known killers in the prison population being an unmitigatible lethal threat to guards and to those convicted of non-capital offenses. But no other arguments, including chances of a breakout from prison by any one murderer, outright defeated the life-in-prison argument entirely. At least not until now.


Here are just three new developments that I can think of now that undermine the idea that killers put away for life terms will never again arise to threaten society as a whole:

1. Their continued existence makes them an object of sympathy of the radical Islamists, providing the latter another reason to lash out at our society in general.
2. The radicals may decide to attack one or more of our already high security prisons -- a threat that should already have and will increase costs of running such institutions.
3. Every murderer is now a higher risk (to society) of being freed -- an event no longer solely in the hands of parole boards, but now also in the hands of fate. The fate of a successful prison break orchestrated with Saudi or other similar limitless money.

I am sure readers can come up with more reasons. But here is a special thing to remember. No matter how many times Leftists are dealt devastating blows to their premises, they manage, with the great help of establishment media, to drown out that fact. And then they go on to insert new and preposterous arguments into the discussion as if they haven't been revealed to be wholly devoid of humility and desire to protect our societies. Please be prepared. Don't let them get away with the stunts this time.