Summary

Murdering a person is one of the worst crimes that can be committed. It undermines the value of life and the punishment for this should be of comparable calibre. Should the minimum punishment be life in prison or should the person have a chance to be released - that is what we debated about. The motion set forward in this debate was that "CONVICTED MURDERERS SHOULD NEVER BE RELEASED". For most of us, murdering a person is unimaginable. It takes a great degree of motivation and determination to finally pull the trigger, thrust the knife into a body or to hit someone with full force, knowing that the one doing this is going to watch the victim’s life drain out of his eyes. That final act of defiance has to overcome a mental barrier that prevents us all from going out and killing people. And once that has been overcome, it is easier to do it the second time. That is why serial killers and gang members are often the most ruthless killers. For most murderers, killing for the second time is easier than killing the first time. We the proposition argued that murderers should never be released because they pose a serious threat to innocent people and reforming them is almost impossible, not foolproof and not economically viable for many countries. We based our arguments and counter arguments on these basic facts – 1. The murderers will not pose a risk to the people since they will be within prison walls, 2. The punishment of prisoners will deter other criminals from committing murders, 3. The chances of changing a murderer into a good person is almost impossible, not foolproof and not economically viable for many countries, 4. And that life imprisonment is not a breaking of human rights. However, what the opposition proposed was to overhaul the complete criminal procedure system. They suggest offering counselling classes to all murderers so that they can be changed and made into productive members of the society. They suggest release of this prisoners when a “change has been observed in them” without mentioning how that change will be measured, and only directly offered this very important argument at the second phase of their debate. They have imagined up and presented to us a world where torture that “destroys the person's very existence” is commonplace and almost always happens in prisons and where murderers are like soft clay which can be moulded like the opposition wants them to into good productive members of the society where they will pose no risk whatsoever to innocent people. Throughout the debate we have emphasized the fact that what the opposition suggested was not practical. Cases of murderers being good again are extremely rare. It is true what the opposition said about many of these murderers being mislead. This is true for people like members of gang. For these people committing is not even a big deal. Convincing them to go against the very ideas they were born into is not only difficult, it is almost impossible. And we cannot even be sure at the end whether their instincts have changed- so we cannot take the risk. They have quoted from the Bible, saying that people SHOULD be healed, but what if they CANNOT be healed. We will not know if they have actually been healed and we simply cannot take that risk. They have imposed the idea that if we follow the motion, we will be one of the murderers since we take their lives. What they fail to understand is that we are saving other people’s lives. They want to release prisoners once they have observed a change in them – but how do we measure this change? – Can we afford repeated trials? – And how do we know that the changes are for real? - And even if they are, how do we know that the murderers will not change again after release? We think that the better alternative to making guesses which can risk the lives of innocent people is to not make guesses at all. They have talked about torture through the example of Gitmo. But that is even a thing that most Americans are ashamed off. Civilian prisons do not allow torture, and practising it is a crime. Life imprisonment is not a breaking of human rights since prisoners are getting their basic human rights, and there is a right of people to live without fear, and if murderers were released, that right would be sacrificed. Near the end of their arguments, they have shown some simple mathematics to show how counselling classes will be cheaper in long run. The proposition was amazed at how vaguely they took the matter of counselling. The example assumed that all the murderers who were counselled would be released. We wish convincing people was that easy. Neither one of us till now seems to be able to convince the other of how we are right – convincing a murderer is going to be even harder. If we do follow their proposal, very few murderers will be released and counselling has to be continued for the rest. And then there are obviously the costs of “observing change” along with the counselling costs. In the end this becomes costlier than the alternative proposed by us and not vice versa. If murderers were to be released so easily, and if I were a murderer, I would pretend to have been changed during the counselling classes, come out, commit crimes again, knowing that all I had to do was pretend to have been changed during the counselling classes that I would have to face in prison. We argued resource-poor countries like Bangladesh and Nepal would have trouble keeping prisoners on watch during parole and to give counselling classes. In reply to that they suggested that since the prisons were such, prison-escapes would also be high. Here a question arises – should we guess and release prisoners to put innocent people at risk, or should we try our best to stop escapes, which is much easier than monitoring released prisoners. They have to remember the prisoners are also resource-poor, so escaping for them is also not easy. Besides this we have also pointed out that without the murderers the society would be a better place, as the young people are not being influenced by them. Gang memberships would decrease and less people would be misled. We also pointed out that in some countries businessmen would be freer and economic activity would increase. In the end, we the proposition think that the governments of countries should do as proposed by us so that they can fulfil the promise of protecting the citizens of the country so that the people do not have to live in fear anymore.