Is Redemption a Human Right? New Book Tracks the Demise of Clemency | Amanpour and Company

So articulate and knowledgeable. Thank you for this interview with Professor Hilger.

Excellent interview. Thank you Historian Reiko Hillyer for opening our eyes and minds to the history and possibility of clemency programs. Mercy is something we could use more of.

A good iinterview. Greetings from Sweden. :)

What about the prisons being privatized, and becoming a money making machine, to keep their prisons full..!??

The task of prisons, I think, should be to "correct" those who, with the help of different forms of care, who can improve. Otherwise, they must protect the public from this individual. I don't know how it is in the U.S. but here in Sweden, which also has overcrowded prisons, the care offered in the prisons is voluntary. Perhaps an incentive to undergo treatment could be an earlier, and planned, release.

If America had a robust welfare state, the incarceration-prison state would only intervene for those who could not be supported before they were criminalized. Even among those people, medicalization, through a public universal health mandate would further lower incarceration rates. For example, by treating addiction as a medical condition not a criminal-legal one. In other words, social policy and social programs and social programs, are only being (cruelly) substituted with criminal justice policy and legal enforcement programs.

I confess that I struggle with the concept of forgiveness, clemency, mercy, in theory, absolutely yes. However, too often it seems to be demanded of those harmed by those who deem themselves "entitled" to forgiveness. How (and perhaps, why) should there be the expectation of forgiveness or even redemption without reparation or even the effort of repairing the harm done (and harm & cessation)? Perhaps, we are looking at the question from the wrong direction. What if we looked at the problem from the perspective of (1) admission of the error (actual meaning of the word "sin"); (2) honest attempt at repair/service; (3) redemptive patience, rather than expectation? (Matthew 5:23-24)

Once again people are forgetting the lessons learn in the past. The change in the use of clememcy was not the result of extraordinary cases like willie horton. It was result of the common problem that the attempts to use the past to predict future action was unsuccessful in a large number of cases. Once again the compassion is for the one responsible not the victim. The parole and clemency processes had significant number of failures. In truth it did have success to. The job of the criminal system is primarily to protect the average citizen. Does mean that compassion and forgiveness not be available. No. But it should be used sparingly.

Redemption is an EV away .

Back in England, when we were a colony, England sent criminals to the US and Australia. Might that have been a source or at least a contributing history for the harsh lengthy imprisonments she is talking about

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