“Survey Reveals Opinions On Criminal Punishment” from the July 20, 1939 Door County News
Survey Reveals Opinions On Criminal Punishment
Pardon and parole should be abolished and persons convicted of crimes should serve their full sentences except where injustice is revealed by new evidence, in the opinion of 83 per cent of the men and 86 per cent of the women covered in a survey of 25,000 Northwestern National life Insurance policy holders. Death penalty for murder was approved by 86 per cent of the men and 75 per cent of the women; 88 per cent of the men and 93 per cent of the women favored sterilization of habitual criminals. Many expressed alarm over current conditions and favored “cracking down” on tender treatment of criminals. The first aim of penal and legal forces should be to protect the law-abiding by making crime dangerous and its rewards unpleasant, thought 81 per cent of the women and 78 per cent of the men, with rehabilitation of the criminal important, but secondary. The recommendations of those questioned included separation of first offenders from “repeaters” in prisons; closing of loopholes in procedure through which “smart” lawyers can free criminals at a profit; placing of more police powers in federal hands; and use of criminals sentenced to execution for purposes of scientific research, the latter suggestion proceeding from a number of doctors.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
[Northwestern National was based out of Minneapolis, which may have resulted in survey results which were disproportionately from the Midwest. After multiple consolidations, in 2000 it was purchased by ING Group.
In December 2024, ING Group’s former CEO avoided prosecution for enabling money laundering, https://nltimes.nl/2024/12/18/former-ceo-will-prosecuted-money-laundering-scandal-ing, which involved a different part of ING Group’s business, separate from Northwestern: https://fintelegram.com/ralph-hamers-and-ings-money-laundering-scandal-a-pending-indictment-and-comparisons-to-swedbanks-case
At the time this survey was taken, national support for the death penalty may have been somewhere between the 60% reported in 1937 and the 68% reported in 1953, from Gallup’s polling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1606/Death-Penalty.aspx
In 2017 Tennessee inmates were given 30 days less jail in return for sterilization or a long term hormonal implant, https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1333&context=djglp. The second section of this article discusses the history of abuses committed as part of coercive sterilization programs.
A 2016 Marquette Law School poll found that punishment was considered a higher priority than rehabilitation: https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1179&context=socs_fac
Currently there are restrictions on the use of prisoners for research, https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/section-46.306. The use of prisoners for experimental drug testing was common from the 1950s through the 1970s: https://bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu/achre/final/chap9_4.html ]
Articles related to jail or prison inmates
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