![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019re coming here from Conversion Diary, I really recommend you take a look at a guest post series I had this week on the Mormon priesthood. After a couple news sources started reporting on Romney\u2019s priesthood and role as a bishop, and asking whether we\u2019d be concerned if a Methodist priest or a Catholic bishop became a politician, I realized I needed more data about how Mormons<\/a> think about priesthood.<\/p>\n A college friend of mine graciously stepped in, explained what priesthood means in the LDS tradition<\/a> and then answered questions that started as simple\u00a0clarifications\u00a0and went on to science fiction and theology of the body. \u00a0You can check out all three posts at the link above.<\/p>\n I\u2019m glad he gave us data and corrected some widely-repeated misperceptions. \u00a0In his honor, the theme for this week\u2019s Takes is Justice (which tends to lead to depressing posts, so, if you make it all the way through, I\u2019ve put a well-designed robot at the end to cheer us up).<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n First off, I really appreciated Chris\u2019s anti-death penalty op-ed<\/a> this week in the Yale Daily News<\/em>. \u00a0He\u2019s writing from the Catholic perspective, but keeps his arguments accessible to a secular audience.<\/p>\n As a Catholic, I stand against the death penalty on moral grounds. Unfortunately, many misunderstand the nature of the Church\u2019s teaching on this subject, associating it only with other issues of respecting human life \u2014 opposition to abortion and unjust war among them \u2014 without making the connection to justice. I wish to highlight the Church\u2019s teachings on justice, as I think they ought be embraced not only by Catholics, but also by all residents of my home state.<\/p>\n Very often, our ideas of punishment are retributive rather than rehabilitative, full of vengeance rather than chastisement. The Catholic Catechism, seeking humility in human judgment, teaches that punishment in civil society should focus on the safety of society and the rehabilitation of the criminal. The death penalty can only be justified when it is necessary to protect society from the aggressor. Capital punishment clearly fails the rehabilitation test as well, focusing on a murderer not as a broken human to rebuild, but as a futile sacrifice \u2014 a death that can never bring our loved ones back to life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And now there\u2019s a theology fight in the comments section, so that\u2019s always fun.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Opponents of the death penalty sometimes say \u201cBetter 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be put to death.\u201d \u00a0In n Guilty Men<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0a quirky paper for the University of Pennsylvania Law review, Alexander Volokh compiles all the proportions that legal scholars and cultural critics have claimed as the appropriate balance, starting with Abraham\u2019s negotiation with God in Genesis.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n In an essay titled \u201cRaise the Crime Rate<\/a>,\u201d Christopher Glazek of n+1 magazine wants us to consider a much more radical trade-off. \u00a0He suggests the American prison system is a modern-day Omelas*, and we need to abolish it all together.<\/p>\n Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country\u2019s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America\u2019s propensity for anger and violence.<\/p>\n Crime has not fallen in the United States\u2014it\u2019s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country\u2019s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie\u2014but as the single most shameful lie in American life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n *The reference is to the Ursula Le Guin short story \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas<\/a>\u201c<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n The book that first got me fired up about the criminal justice system was Actual Innocence<\/a><\/em>, a collection of case profiles written by the founders of the Innocence Project<\/a>. \u00a0I strongly recommend it to everyone;\u00a0it did a lot to inform my skepticism<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Many of the\u00a0exonerations\u00a0the Innocence Project won turned on DNA evidence. \u00a0The latest Cato Unbound symposia is all about exploring what the prevalence of DNA testing means for capital punishment<\/a>. \u00a0It\u2019s easier to prove someone\u2019s innocence and<\/em> easier to establish guilt fairly definitively. \u00a0So should we feel more comfortable sentencing prisoners to death if they were convicted using DNA evidence?<\/p>\n I side with Chris and say no, since the ultimate aim of the criminal justice system should be rehabilitation, not retribution. \u00a0If rehabilitation seems impossible, better to keep trying while keeping the prisoner contained.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Ok, you made it to the end. \u00a0Take a deep breath and watch the DARPA-funded robot that can jump 30 feet. (h\/t Wired<\/a>)<\/p>\n