okay so what are what are your views on on capital punishment
i have ambivalent feelings because i don't think it serves as a kind of deterrent we would like to think it is
but on the other hand it is very very expensive to maintain you know Texas has one of the biggest criminal justice systems in the country
yes
and it's eating us alive budget wise
and um
so are they currently practicing capital punishment in your state
yes we do practice capital punishment but the nature of the uh courts and the appeals and the stays and all that means that it's a very long haul before anybody's ever executed
yes that's similar to Georgia
yeah and then i was reading in the paper just this morning it's interesting because i had forgotten i guess that i wrote this little topic down that it costs more to execute somebody than than it does to keep them
that's probably true considering
because of all the costs of the appeals and all that you know
yes yes um i guess in a way that it it kind of defeats the purpose of having capital punishment if
well i think capital punishment is supposed to be
primarily a deterrent to other people
yes
you know who would see it
right that would be the intent of it
yeah but i'm not sure
how successful that is
well i think it would be more successful if it was applied
in a more expedient manner if there weren't so many appeals yeah if if the person who's gonna commit the crime knew that they were gonna be punished severely possibly capital punishment
quicker maybe yeah
um-hum
what what kind of work do you do
uh i'm a research engineer i work uh for with Georgia Tech
hum well see i'm a school principal
um
elementary school
yes
and in a very poor section of town with predominantly predominantly Anglo kids
and i see kids already that are gonna be criminals
hum
in spite of everything we can do
and see i'm afraid i think if we would take the equivalent amount of money and invest it in young people
that i mean course you couldn't do that because you got to do something with the ones that are already there
um-hum
but i think if we would make a bigger investment in kids
we'd have fewer decisions to make
um that's probably true but i guess
down the road you know
there's other factors that but pumping pumping pumping more money into the school system is a good thing but it's not gonna
oh yeah
well i'm not talking about just in the school system
oh i see
see i'm talking about like in in uh
i'm afraid i think that there are kids who just ought to be taken out of their homes
and
reared
uh i know institutions don't work that well but it's a bad day because because i have all these kids through my office i have a school of five hundred and thirty seven kids
um-hum
five hundred of them are good solid kids and i have the same thirty seven in my office every day
um
and a lot of their parents are totally irresponsible
some of them in the penal system
so that's a difficult situation
and you know you just see those kids going down the road now not all of them will commit offenses that have to do with capital punishment but some of them have already been in youth centers
um
and that kind of thing and if we had something to do before they get to be full blown adult criminals
and i'm not talking about necessarily in the school system i'm not sure that the school system should be the agent of all the social action
um-hum
i think that's one reason we have problems in school systems
uh and some of them are our problems but a lot of it's because everything society wants we're supposed to do
um-hum
but that's another subject but
well that's probably true what
anyway i dealt with two or three kids today that are gonna end up
where somebody has to make a decision what to do with them
hum
yeah i guess that's not an easy solution there's there's no easy solution for that
um-hum i don't i don't know that there is an easy solution but
if you could find a way to prevent some of it and i'm not sure what it would be
um-hum
it would be money better spent
than do you know it costs more to keep an inmate on death row than it does to send a kid to Harvard
that's true
i'm sure it is yeah
statistically that's true
hum yeah i don't i don't certainly capital punishment isn't gonna solve a lot of problems but
um-hum
are you for it
uh
i'm for it in in some cases yeah
i guess i am for certain crimes yeah in certain crimes
what kind of crimes would you do use it for
um premeditated murder
um-hum
crimes of that nature i think should definitely any mass murderer type individual
i i would consider it for sexual abuse of children
on going
you know not one instance but perpetual abusers of children
hum
um-hum
well you always have castration
well you know somebody elected that recently
yes i read about that
and all the civil rights people are up in arms about it you know
um-hum
but uh
