Guillotine Sam Smathers 4th

“Bring the Guillotine Back to Death Row”

By: Conor Friedersdorf from The Atlantic

Commentary by: Sam Smathers 4^th           

            This article is about wanting to bring the guillotine back as the primary way to kill people in regards to capital punishment because it is quick, painless, and cost effective. The cons are that no one wants to be the executioner and that it is super gory and nasty. The author thinks that if the United States made the guillotine the only mean of capital punishment acceptable, that capital punishment would disappear because no one would want to drop the knife down on someone’s head.

            I am neither con nor pro capital punishment. I feel like our prison system is too far from what it should for me to even take a position on that. Before we even think about capital punishment we should think of all the people in prison that committed minor crimes and how they are eating up all of this money that we could put toward education. I think we should have less people in prison and if that means enforcing capital punishment for crimes such as mass murder than that would be okay. I would rather spend all the money it would take to keep that guy alive on something like education or sustainable energy rather than on meals for a guy that killed thirty people. I think prisons should find a way to make money, they have lots of people that just sit around and do nothing all day, maybe if they taught these convicts how to be superb gardeners or awesome customer service people than jails wouldn’t need all the government funding that they do. The goal needs to be how to reduce the costs of running prisons, because they gobble up too much money.