SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Making art can be a kind of escape, and it's hard to think of a place that begs louder for escape than death row. For inmates facing the death penalty, art offers a way to define their own identity and assert their existence to an audience far beyond the confines of their cell and long after their execution.
The relationship between prison and creative pursuit is long and strong. Writing has historically been the go-to creative outlet for prisoners, as it can be achieved with minimal resources and the product can be hidden or secreted in and out of cells. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago from the forced labour camps of the former Soviet Union. Martin Luther King Jr wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Alabama. And, in a sign of how art and form evolve with time, US rapper Gucci Mane even recorded some verses of his 2010 album Burrprint 2 over the phone from prison.
In prisons in the US, Europe and Australia, visual art classes and resources are now available to more inmates than ever before. These programmes have been shown to have a positive influence on the immediate and long-term behaviour of prisoners – though often the resources allocated to them are scarce. When these aren't available, innovation often prevails, with paints made from crushed sweets or instant coffee.
[...] "Generally, but more extremely on death row, part of the incarceration process involves stripping away your identity as a human being," [Margot] Ravenscroft says. "The expression of art is a way of redressing that dehumanisation and identifying yourself as an individual and as a member of society."
Source: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170126-the-death-row-inmates-who-make-art
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 30 2017, @08:45PM
Then change your system. If you are the USA, I don't understand what the long wait is for. Until the UK abolished the death penalty, it was carried out about a week after sentence.
First off, most crimes are prosecuted in the U.S. under state laws, which means there are at least 51 different justice systems to deal with.
And well, there is the appeals process. Surely if we allow other sentences to be appealed, we should also allow death sentences to be? Part of the problem there is that the court system is hopelessly backlogged in the U.S., too. This is a larger systemic problem.
But the larger issue is what I mentioned, i.e., that many states [wikipedia.org] have placed ALL death sentences in a kind of "legal limbo" due to various concerns. Others have convoluted appeals processes that drag on for decades. Others (notably Texas) seem to "fast-track" as many as possible. The kind of inconsistency shown by the legal system across the U.S. with this issue already is rather concerning.
We know that we have imprisoned innocent people too; so should we ban prisons? Even if they are freed, years (probably the best years) of their lives have been wasted.
Yes, I made a similar argument in my youthful days too when debating the death penalty opponents. The reasoning now seems incredibly flawed to me -- a miscarriage of justice is not made better by killing someone. If they want to kill themselves because of a wrongful conviction and imprisonment, that would be their choice. Simply because the justice system sometimes makes egregious errors is not a justification for the state executing people.
The simple fact is that a wrongful conviction has a CHANCE of being overturned and the person gets a CHANCE at perhaps living out the rest of his/her life. You're right that you can never restore those lost years to someone, but -- whatever side of the death penalty debate one is on -- I think it's rather disingenuous to argue there isn't something a BIT more permanent about execution.