California bishops decry lengthy solitary confinement

[tominrichmond]

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

The CCC thus has two main points: 1) the conditional clause beginning “IF non lethal means, etc.” and 2) the death penalty is not widely needed because of “possibilities which the state has for… rendering [offenders] incapable of doing harm”

Whether the conditional clause of point 1 is fulfilled is very much a practical, prudential determination, not a theological one, and is of course, entrusted to those with the most information to make such a determination, that is, the public authorities.

Second, the CCC does not specify what possibilities exist that render offender harmless. My point is that since life without parole does NOT render offenders harmless, and since we now know that a group of bishops thinks that even solitary confinement is impermissible, the Church cannot possibly mean that incarceration as we understand it in this country is one of those “possibilities.”

Until the Church clarifies what is meant by these mysterious “possibilities,” society must serenely go about the business of carrying out justice and protecting the public by executing the worst offenders who constitute a threat to re-offend.

 

[St_Francis]

If I’m not mistaken, what caused the prisoners to start a hunger strike in the first place is that the prison guards were abusing their power and arbitrarily putting inmates into solitary confinement, sometimes indefinitely (some have been in solitary confinement for decades). As noted in this article, an imprisoned physician was sent to a SHU for administering CPR to a fellow inmate having a heart attack. The prisoners were demanding that a five-year limit be given to solitary confinement.

From your link:
The Commission on Safety and Abuse in American’s Prisons, a bipartisan national task force, reported in 2006 that between 1995 and 2000, the use of solitary confinement in the United States had increased by 40 percent, outpacing the 28 percent growth rate of the overall prison population. **The commission concluded that solitary confinement is counterproductive to public safety and recommended ending long-term isolation of inmates. **

 

[gracepoole]

I see this tendency so often among people in general. They decry X, then they decry X-1, then X-2, and so on. Like in Mexico, first the death penalty was ruled against, and then life imprisonment w/o parole!

This shouldn’t be surprising – a majority of developed countries view a sentence of life without the possibility of parole as inhumane.