Zapping the Scary Monsters

Death Row prisoners in the States may spend decades awaiting death any day.
That means half their lifetime is spent locked in a cage, unable to work, for a crime they may have committed half a lifetime ago.
The crimes they are accused of are unspeakable. Yet whenever the prisoner’s name is recalled, the crime is the only thing the public or the media speak about.
Society identifies the person with the offence, to the extent of ceasing to see the offender as a person at all.
Because all violence is monstrous, the person who stands accused of it is considered a monster. His or her human attributes arouse no interest.
The common factor among Death Row prisoners is not a higher level of crime than those who were sentenced to life without parole.
It is often hard to see why one offender has been sentenced to life and another to death.
Some researchers claim that the common factors among Death Row inmates are poverty, deprivation, poor legal representation in the early stages of their process, and politicians' and prosecutors' reliance on ‘successful’ death sentencing rates for their career advancement.
One Death Row prisoner, whose background is far from untypical, grew up in a neighbourhood where the only escape from poverty for black kids was to get involved in the 'night life' world and become a pimp.
Following older members of his family, he was drawn into this environment from the age of 12.
Convicted for a violent crime in the early 1980s and locked away under the tightest security ever since, this man is now hardly a threat to society.
There seems to be no possible reason to kill him, other than to satisfy a violent thirst for violent revenge for acts of violence – a pitiful cycle that benefits nobody.
Our society, which rightly abhors and condemns heartless crime, is still focusing attention on individuals who commit open and obvious acts of violence and labels them as the Scary Monsters of our ‘civilized’ society.
Claiming to solve the problem of violence by rendering these individuals defenceless, then coldbloodedly killing them, conveys a double standard that is truly monstrous.
It is also naive – as childish a solution to crime as shouting at the monsters under the bed is a solution to a child's fear of darkness. As grown-up members of society, we need to turn on the lights.
We need to stop tacitly condoning a system which selects certain perpetrators of violent acts to be the Scary Monsters, accuses them of being the source of violence in our world, and locks them in cages before zapping them to death.
And we need to turn the spotlight on the factors that cause children to grow up believing that evil is good and that violent pimps, drug dealers and gangsters – or compassionless political career-hunters – are role models for adulthood.
We could make a start at ending the cycle of violence by listening to the real experts on our failure to rescue potential victims of crime and the potential offenders.
Experts like the Death Row prisoners.