I was prompted to write this in response to someone's asking why we kill those who kill.

THE REASON THAT MURDERERS ARE KILLED is to prevent the murderer from doing so again, and to deter those bad, or marginally bad, persons from committing murder.

By the way, Killing and murder are different as some killings are justified as in national or personal defense. I say that execution or imprisonment should only be carried out for society's protection, not for punishment per se--which is a form of retaliation--vindictiveness. Vindication along with anger is a residual, evolutionary defense mechanism for protecting yourself and your people--something that evolved in we humans long ago. Compassion, I believe, is another early-evolved human and primate trait, which, like anger and vindication, helped the survival-rate of the clan or troop of chimps etc.

THE PENAL SYSTEM should remember that even the worst person--say a louse such as Saddam Hussein, cannot help himself to become a nicer, socially acceptable person. A mean sociopath, just like a nice person, cannot change himself to the better or to the worse. A person is born with his or her genetic make-up which dictates his talents, ambitions, likes, dislikes, compassion and other psychological traits. A person cannot change his psychological traits any more than he can change his physical traits; he is born with them both through the genetic code. Really, we understood this long ago to some degree. Hence the aphorism: A leopard cannot change his spots. A person is not guilty of his genetic make-up; he has no choice in the matter, no choice in his parentage. You could say that we have to play the hand that we were dealt. This is the unwritten (as far as I know) reason for execution of a humane manner--the reason the French used the guillotine--a mercifully quick death--death for those too dangerous for freedom amongst society.

ATTACKING THE CRIMINAL: Not understanding the passion of retaliation as an evolutionary self-defense mechanism, angry sentiment such as: "stone the louse to death" are often felt. Courts and victims of criminals seem to believe as though a nice person of completely decent mental capacity awakens one morning and thinks " I'm gonna do something rotten today--I'm gonna change into a mean, yes, a malevolent creep". It just doesn't happen. Similarly, a mean rotten scoundrel doesn't change into someone decent; it simply is not of his or her genetic make-up.

There is a popular belief of an environmental-influential effect on personality--an alteration of ones behavior from treatment received from others and from life's general experience during the formative years of human development. This belief is greatly exaggerated. After much analyzing, I came to the same conclusion of the sixty-plus-years-old postulation that a person's behavior is mostly genetically programmed. With my conclusion separate from my hearing of, and therefore uninfluenced by the old postulation, I give the genetic theory credence. My guess is about 90 per cent of a person's mental personality is from their genetic make-up--their genetic "background" leaving the remaining 10 percent to environmental influence. Although not a romantic fact, we are indeed a genetic product with some of us lucky, and others, rather "victims" of our parentage.

Richard Stuart Otto, 25 Feb. 2007