Should have been locked up
I caught a show this evening called “The First 48”. It traces a murder investigation for the critical first 48 hours. Tonight the show followed the murder of a young man in Birmingham, Alabama. He was robbed, shot and murdered in front of a crowd of people in his car. By all accounts, he was a decent, hard working, young man.
The suspect, who confessed but is still “presumed” innocent, had been out of jail for just 30 days. He had served 3 years for armed robbery.
Three years. Armed Robbery. That makes no sense. That is the 2nd crime in this story. It seems obvious, apparently to everyone but our political elite, that somebody who takes a gun and robs another has decided that society’s norms are just not for them.
I see no reason to not kill them. Or at a minimum to lock them away for a length of time indistinguishable from forever.
You can go on about how prison is expensive blah blah blah. But I think we should worry about making prison cheap, which seems very doable, rather than figuring out what to do with young men that are incapable of not being dangerous to others.
Kill them. Strand them on a desert island. Lock them up in a large swath of desert. I don’t care. Just keep them away from the rest of us.