Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent. It is time for a new national dialogue on crime and corrections, justice and mercy, responsibility and treatment. A Catholic approach begins with the recognition that the dignity of the human person applies to both victim and offender. The imposition of the death penalty is inconsistent with fundamental values of a democratic system. The state should not arrogate unto itself the right to kill human beings, especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, under color of law, in our names, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion.
Capital punishment is an intolerable denial of civil liberties.
I review very briefly what I consider to be the major argument for prescribing the hard treatment that constitutes punishment. In Section III I consider several factors that might be appealed to in limiting the hardness of the hard treatment of imprisonment, claiming in particular that imprisonment must be neither inhumane nor degrading. And in Section IV I suggest some positive, restorative directions that should be pursued when imposing hard treatment. Lawrence M. Hinman Stun belts raise a number of interesting moral issues, in part because they simultaneously call forth conflicting moral intuitions for some of us. On the one hand, there is something about them that appeals to a sense of what one might call moral efficiency.