"I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution which
               undermines the moral and legal foundations of a society."
                                                                                             -- Andrei Sakharov
 

As a CCADP member as well as a citizen of the United States and of the State of California, I would like to express in strongest terms my appreciation for these pages in the defense of human rights, human dignity, and the great principle of the inviolability of life.

In California and elsewhere in the USA, sadly, there is a kind of political industry based on the marketing of officially decreed death as an "anti-crime" or "pro-victim" measure. In a country where to espouse the basic human rights standards of Amnesty International and the European Union may amount to "political suicide" for a judge or elected officeholder, we should not be surprised that some officials engaging in or attempting to defend the human rights violation of the death penalty would portray CCADP's efforts as being "an affront to the victims."

To such a view, one may oppose two important points, the first specifically directed to the issue of the death penalty (which is CCADP's concern), the second to the broader issue of building a more humane system of criminal justice which seeks to reconcile and maximize the rights of victims and offenders alike.

By placing prisoners on Death Row, and subjecting them to what Amnesty International recognizes as the psychological torture of anticipated ritual death by decree, a jurisdiction in the USA (or elsewhere) places at issue the very humanity of these people. In response, CCADP
defends human rights by lending these prisoners an opportunity to say, each in her or his own way, "Please come to know us, and discover that regardless of our guilt or innocence, regardless of the horrible offenses which some of us have indeed committed, we are all human."

To romanticize violent crime is wrong; to humanize both offenders and victims is profoundly right. It is this second mission which CCADP most laudably undertakes in striving to give a voice to Death Row prisoners.

Please let me add that I would like, if possible, to see this process carried a step further, with the Web serving as a channel for dialogue and reconciliation between victims or their families and offenders.

One of the most repugnant feature of the death penalty is placing the families of murder victims and of convicted capital offenders (often guilty, all too often innocent) in a state amounting to warfare. The victim's family is expected to "fight" for the infliction of a new
killing on the victim's family -- a perverse emulation rather than a repudiation of the cruelty of the original crime.

Such a spectacle enacts a public theater of physical and emotional violence, and indeed focuses the public imagination on every brutal detail of the original private crime and the public execution alike.  The expenses of death penalty litigation and Death Row confinement
additionally divert both public funds and the communnity's imagination away from the tasks of prevention, reconciliation, and healing -- precisely the priorities which a truly victim-oriented system of justice must embrace.

By inviting us to look at Death Row inmates as human beings, and giving these prisoners the means to tell their own stories, CCADP promotes a recognition of mutual humanity liberating for us all.

From the perspective of CCADP, the purpose of this effort is simply to save lives and uphold both human and civil rights. While the death penalty is an intrinsic human rights violation in all cases, many of  the Death Row inmates in the USA have additionally had their civil rights violated by the imposition of death sentences in an invidious and pervasive atmosphere of racism and classism. Humanizing these prisoners may help to illustrate these points in the most concrete terms, and to mobilize a response which can abolish Death Row.

This abolition accomplished, CCADP would have fulfilled its mission -- and from this standpoint, the prisoner Web pages would have served their purpose and could be taken down. However, speaking only for myself and going beyond CCADP's basic struggle for the inviolability of human life, I would like to argue that Web pages of this kind might point to a new kind of criminal justice system based on restoration, reconciliation, and restitution.

The kind of punitive mentality which has made the death penalty an article of political orthodoxy in many parts of the USA also makes imprisonment a growth industry, with politicians vying to lengthen sentences and make the conditions of incarceration more extreme.

In contrast, a criminal justice system based on reconciliation would recognize that the evil of crime is found precisely in its indifference to the integrity and well-being of the victim, and that
society's "best revenge," so to speak, is to treat offenders as humanly as possible while duly repudiating the injustices they have committed and encouraging restitution and reconcilation.

Imprisonment is a serious punishment _in itself_, because it deprives the prisoner of liberty. For a humane society, this loss of liberty should be punishment enough, and indeed a prison system should seek to mitigate rather than to aggravate the inevitable pain of such a
sanction, and to enhance the prisoner's opportunities for education, self-expression, and personal growth as much as possible.

Obviously a prison administration has the right and responsibility to prevent prisoners from escaping; from harming themselves, staff members, or other prisoners; and from committing or organizing new crimes. Current prison systems in jurisdictions such as the USA typically exert far too little effort to safeguard inmates from arbitrary violence by staff as well as other prisoners, and this genuine issue of security deserves far more attention.

Within these limitations, however, resources such as pen pal programs, Web pages, prison arts projects, and other means of self-expression  and humanization may actually promote prison security. They encourage human beings in prison to reflect on their own lives and responsibilities, as well as on abilities and potentials which neither society at large nor they themselves may have yet fully recognized.

For prisoners to take responsibility for their own lives, to value them, and to dedicate them to restitution and restoration is for the benefit of crime victims, their families, and society as a whole. Thus a "pro-victim" orientation is also a "pro-offender" orientation: while justly denouncing the outrage of the crime, society recognizes the humanity as well as the responsibility of the offender. A prison experience maximizing human and civil rights and responsibilities within the limits of security, including the responsibility and privilege of making restitution -- and (the victim or victim's family willing) seeking reconciliation -- is consistent with such a policy.

In the short run, CCADP's lauable campaign to humanize Death Row prisoners promotes the basic human rights standard of the inviolability of life. In the longer run, looking beyond the specific  mission of CCADP, Web pages and other forms of nonviolent self-expression for prisoners may be the tools of a new and more humane criminal justice system.

Having wandered a bit outside CCADP's own agenda, I would like to conclude by returning squarely to that agenda: the recognition that the death penalty is a corrosive form of violence degrading to the humanity of those who endure it, those who administer it, and those who willingly or unwillingly have it carried out in their names.

By underscoring the humanity of Death Row prisoners, or more precisely letting the prisoners do this for themselves, CCADP has made itself a precious friend to dissidents for social peace and human rights in the USA who share the larger world's growing sense of outrage that a
government should seek deliberately to take the life of a subdued prisoner. In the USA of the year 2000, as in the USSR of the year 1980, such international solidarity is a priceless gift.

Most respectfully,

Margo Schulter: mschulter@value.net