In case you didn’t notice, with all the recent fanfare involving ground-breaking Supreme Court decisions, government spying, or the demise of a Southern cooking empire, Texas—where they do everything on a grand scale—carried out its 500^th “modern execution.” Modern, that is to say, since 1982, when the death penalty was resumed in that state.

500 executions in 31 years! Unpardonable. The size of a small town. What a dreadful waste of human life. The life sentence alternative at least exonerates vengeance. Yet, is there no other humane possibility?

In the late 1960's, shortly after the UK abolished the death penalty, I was invited to speak at the Annual Meeting of the Scottish Prison & Borstal Govenors' meeting where their main concern was what to do with prisoners serving life sentences, especially those who were young? The only suggestion that had been put to them was transferring such prisoners to another prison for a month each year as a kind of “busman’s holiday!”

I proposed an alternative which not only spares human life, but allows prisoners another opportunity to pay their debt to society by helping us better understand the criminal mind. After all, every man or woman on death row was once a child—what went wrong? And who could better tell us than that person?

No Pie-in-the-sky

What I proposed, & have been advocating for the past 45 years, was several “crime labs” whereby prisons would operate in collaboration with university criminal justice schools—much like the arrangements medical schools have with hospitals—combining teaching and research with treatment. Only this idea would include prisoners collaborating with the professors as teachers & as researchers. If they also became better human beings, well that would be a spin-off.

Could prisoners be interested in self-study? Years ago psychologists at California's hard-boiled San Quentin Prison studied the records of its most violent prisoners, and then asked a number of them if they would be interested in working on a project to study violence of their most notorious. Indeed, they were interested. The psychologists taught them how to interview the other prisoners & then they formed a study group where they scrutinized their results. Remarkable. Their important book, Violent Men (Aldine 1969) tells what they found out—not only what but how they got their information: From & by their most violent.

A Crime Lab would give criminology professors a living laboratory for study and research in criminal behavior; a place where they could conduct various kinds of treatment & study its effectiveness, while offering students a place for an internship in preparation for their life’s work. It would give the prison new life as well as a new humanizing purpose—not merely custodians, but contributors to understanding and dealing with one of our most serious social problems.

Executing 500 potential criminology teachers & researchers is an incalculable loss to our nation’s treasure at a time when their know-how is so sorely needed.

Cross posted from Dennie’s Blog