Reader It’s Just Boris made this comment:
On the other hand, I also don’t believe a government should routinely be in the business of deliberately and purposefully putting its own citizens to death.
And what if there was a way that we could deal with human predators deserving the death penalty that did not involve the government killing or the families affected? I believe I have the answer: Alaska.
I believe that the green areas are probably millions upon millions of acres of pure and pristine nature, untouched by civilization. My idea is to grab all those on death row and during the Spring in Alaska, drop them in the middle of the north green area with clothes on their back, a box of waterproof matches and a knife. The idea is to let the human predator make his living among nature’s predators and Mother Nature itself. The convict will have a nice huge tattoo across his forehead as a warning label for others that he is a bad guy and the admonition that if my the miracle of God, they manage to reach hamlet, village, town or city, the Federal government will pay a bounty of $100,000 for his dead ass.
We don’t have to kill them, but sure as hell we don’t have to give them a roof, 3 hot ones plus dental and medical.
Just an idea.
Robert Heinlein wrote a novella on that idea, “Coventry”.
Damn it, Like I need another book in my pile.
Thanks!
It is a short story, it won’t take long to read. You can find it in _Revolt in 2100_
Lots of good stories in the Heinlein universe. My daughter says he was a time traveler that got just enough wrong to keep people from figuring it out.
Just a a cute FYI, He holds the patent for water beds. The California dude that actually created it did his due diligence and realized he had gotten the idea from Heinlein’s book _Stranger in a Strange Land_. So he put the patent in Heinlein’s name.
You can never have too many books. Sometimes it can be a hassle, but the alternative is far worse. I tell you, when the Wuhan Virus hit and everyone was going into lockdown mode, I was thinking “hell, whatever else happens, I got books enough to last me for a few years at least, who needs the library and the internet?” Luckily(?) the net didn’t go down, though the library was closed for weeks. But it gave me a chance to work through some of the books I’ve been meaning to read since I got them. Other people were out of books and stuck at home, but I’ve got a small library’s worth here. It’s kind of satisfying; a generally well off family home a hundred and fifty years ago might have had a Bible and a copy of “Pilgrim’s Progress”, and maybe up to half a dozen other books, and they would be considered valuable heirloom items, an investment. Richer people could afford larger libraries, but not the middle class, let alone the poor people. The books I have alone would have been a huge library for a small town not that long ago (“over a HUNDRED books! I’ve never seen such wealth!”). But they are books that I picked up here and there over the years, and I usually end up going to the local library and looking through the greater selection (in some ways) they have there. We don’t understand how good we have it, really. And that’s not even accounting for the astonishing amount of info you can get from the internet. It’s really an unprecedented thing in history. Curious to see if the effect is bad or good in the long term.
pkoning beat me to it. One of Heinlein’s most sophisticated stories IMO.. He manages to argue both sides of a fundamental question, giving both sides a fair shake. Sadly, SF fandom, at least online, has become blurred with fantasy fandom & has drifted in a pomo and leftist direction, to its intellectual detriment. I was shocked to see a thread in sffchronicles in which it was apparent that most younger readers totally fail to understand Coventry.
Not all SF, not even on line. There’s Sarah Hoyt, who has some neat fantasy stories (“Draw one in the dark” is the first of a good series) but also some good dystopian stories about the “Usaians” — people who preserve the memory of the Declaration and Constitution in the face of murderous suppression by the authorities.
Another, I’d call him a rising star because he certainly should be if he isn’t already, is Rolf Nelson. There’s his “The stars came back” series. Also “The heretics of St. Possenti”, which sellers put in the “military religious” category, interesting. That one apparently inspired a real life movement. It’s my favorite work of his (though I like them all quite a lot), with a fascinating treatment of religion, PTSD, and guns. Fascinating to me even though I’m an agnostic. (Then again, I enjoyed The Mitzvah too.)
If the concept can work for Sikhs, why can’t it work for Christians with St. Possenti?
I should check it out. Heinlein has some good ideas. I don’t agree with everything he writes (and I don’t know that he does either, it may often just be food for thought, not an attempt to propose “correct’ ideas), but it’s well worth reading. Anything the left decries as “fascist propaganda” is probably worth at least checking out. The only book of his that I’ve read is “Starship Troopers” (also the name of an amazingly bad film with some very slight resemblance to the book), and it is based mostly on ideas taken directly from Plato’s “Republic”. So of course the left calls it “fascist” because, to no one’s surprise the National Socialists ALSO took some of their ideas straight from “Republic”….as have most governments in the last 200 years. Anyway, there is a lot of good food for thought in it about the nature of the state, the meaning of citizenship, the duties of the citizen and the state and the proper relationship between the two, man as a society vs man as an individual (with an emphasis on the society part, which may seem distasteful to Libertarians). And it’s just an entertaining sci fi/military book on its own. So I’ve been meaning to check out some of Heinlein’s other stuff, maybe I’ll get on it now.
Start with “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”
Also “Tunnel in the sky”. If you like that, I would also recommend Rolf Nelson’s “Komenagen: Slog”. Both show teenagers learning by doing what it means to be independent adults.
A new take a Greater Outlawry! I remember that from Njal’s Saga!
But there need to be penalties for aiding outlaws, ’cause you know someone will come up with a well-funded aid, tattoo removal, and repatriation project.
You get to join them in the wilderness.
Ever hear of Australia? Heh heh. Great idea. Luv it
I thought of pretty much the same thing some years ago. Naturally the convict needs to be dropped off a minimum of 100 miles from any road.
…And at an altitude of 100 feet from the ground….
1000 feet. It will give them time to ponder on the way down. And of course WITHOUT a chute.
You’re kinder than I am, you’re letting them stay in the country. I believe that certain crimes mark a person as such a danger to the rest of the people of the republic that we should remove their right to continue to live amongst us. But it wouldn’t be fair to other nations to send them there…
I say we ferry them out past the edge of the United States’ exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles or roughly 230 miles), hand them an inflatable raft, a canteen of potable water (we’re not monsters), and throw them out into international waters.
Where they go next is their problem.
too close to shore…..
While you might not mind seeing the death row folks placed in the wilds of AK. The people living in that great state might mind.
Not that we give a crap about the criminals. Nor are we really concerned they will make it to a village. We don’t want the animals to get used to the taste of human. Really bad thing to do.
Seriously, drop your average person, with only minimal supplies more than 25 miles from any support, and they have close to a zero chance of making it to a village. For some, more than five miles is too far. But, the bear/wolf/wolverine that will feast on their corpse can easily roam that far, and further. And that becomes very dangerous indeed.
Deserts, open water, mountain ranges, remote islands (I am thinking Attu). Good. That works. It will be the carrion eaters that will benefit. Please keep the predators out of the equation. Your average Alaskan will thank you.
Hence my rubber raft in the mare liberum idea.
How could a person fail to make it 25 miles, let alone 5? I mean, if it was the dead of winter, or really tough terrain maybe.
But of course that assumes they know where they are going. I guess with only a vague idea of where the civilization is and no way to keep track of the direction, they would easily get lost. Because otherwise, you can hike 25 miles in a day, and even a person in the wilderness ought to be able to cover it before hunger gets so bad that they can’t travel further. Say 5 days or a week.
John Carpenter had a better idea- wall off New York City, then dump them all in.
A win-win all around.
You cold do the same with San Fran or Portland.
Aukland Island would do, but we’d have to get the cooperation of the New Zealanders to put anybody there.
No to Alaska. Instead, build a giant trebuchet and launch these predators out a mile or more into the sea. If they can make it back they are free to go.
Here’s T-Wrecks launching a 600 pound piano.
Remember the joke, a Canadian, an American engineer, and a Taliban find a genie bottle. Genie appears, three wishes, one each. Canadian:”I love my homeland. May she be forever free, verdant, and happy!”
Poof! It is so.
Taliban:”I want my homeland forever free of the decadent influence of Western Civilization!”
Genie asks, “Will an impenetrable wall work for you?”
Mr. Taliban agrees, it would. Poof!
The American engineer asks, “Could you tell me about that wall?”
Genie responds, “It’s 1 000 feet tall, seamless, impenetrable to any tool your people know.”
Engineer asks, “Can I say my wish, now?”
Genie prompts, “Go ahead!”
“Could you, please, fill it with water?”
Let’s substitute (penal colony), here, hmmm?
They already tried this. It’s called “transportation” and it’s where Autralian, NZ and Tasmania (and in fact a good percentage of the Thirteen Colonies) came from. But of course the left has since decided that it’s brutal, cruel and wrongful punishment, which is the inevitable verdict from the left on ANY sort of program designed to punish people for crimes. Doesn’t matter what it is, they will find objections to it, with the intended result that it no longer is possible to punish criminals (much the same tactic they are employing to prevent the police from enforcing the laws or compelling compliance on ANY suspect….with the possible exception of conservatives and white supremacists). This is why we established the fiction that prisoners aren’t being “punished”, they are being “rehabilitated”, because the left complains so loudly over any and every attempt to PUNISH people. Because of course crime is NEVER the criminal’s fault, it’s always society’s fault, and the only solution is to give the left more power to fix the problems with society. So it’s never going to happen, nice as it sounds.
Anyway, it wouldn’t work well for Alaska. Some of the criminals would inevitably survive, especially since the smarter of them would train beforehand in survival, knowing what will happen when they get caught. They will form gangs under warlords, and pick up and recruit more minions as they are dropped in, making them warriors in exchange for safety and food, and then they start raiding small towns, etc. And it would make it impossible for anyone to venture safely out into the wilderness areas for trapping, hunting, prospecting, oil surveys, etc. Even individuals would gladly rob, maybe kill and eat any person they caught for their supplies, and organized gangs would be even worse. One of the reasons they stopped transportation to Australian and Tasmania and NZ is because the non criminals and the descendants of the original criminals didn’t want more convicts showing up to be THEIR problem instead of the UK’s problem, and they put up a lot of political pressure. No doubt the Alaskans would feel the same way. We COULD always just go and drop them in Afghanistan or in African warzones. But that’s “illegal” under “international law”. You cannot take away a person’s citizenship unless they have another country prepared to take them in (not that I think much of so-called “international law”, which by definition doesn’t exist). These are the same people who claim that you’re not ALLOWED to stop masses of refugees from entering your own country, etc.