Virginia Bans Death Penalty but Leaves Prison Workers to Face the Consequences

      The Virginia legislature has just abolished the state's death penalty, which had been in place for the entire history of the commonwealth. Once the governor signs the abolition legislation, as he surely will, Virginia will become the first southern state to ban capital punishment.

     Virginia's abolition of capital punishment did not respond to any strong public demand for such action, with the latest Gallup poll showing that 55% of Americans still support the death penalty for murderers.  Releasing vicious murderers from the just punishment for their crimes would certainly rank near the bottom of Virginia citizens' concerns in these times of economic and social despondency.

     But Virginia is now a one-party, left-wing state; Democrats now control both houses of the state legislature, all three of the state's executive positions, its federal congressional delegation, and both of its U.S. senate seats.  Consequently, the "progressive" automatons in the Virginia legislature can pass any extreme leftist bill they want, regardless of popular preferences; conservatives and Republicans simply have nowhere to turn in Virginia, since their Democrat "representatives" scornfully disregard whatever hapless opposition they might raise against such bills. Death penalty abolition was merely the latest exercise of the leftist tyranny that now governs Virginia.

     The repeal was surrounded and "justified" by the usual fusillade of falsehood and fraudulence, including the canard that "innocent" citizens are the frequent victims of erroneous capital convictions (convictions that are obtained only after the most rigorous and demanding procedures, standards of proof, and appellate scrutiny that can be devised by the leftists who dominate the legal and judicial establishments).  And, like the "usual suspects" of Casablanca fame, the virtue-signaling repeal advocates dragged out the persistently repeated fiction that the death penalty is discriminatorily imposed against blacks, when (as SR has repeatedly demonstrated) the opposite is the case.

     During the last three reported years (2016-18), for example, 43 whites were executed compared to 16 blacks (see BJS, Capital Punishment 2018, Table 12) -- even though blacks commit about 50% of the murders which alone can justify the death penalty under Supreme Court precedent.  Nonetheless, the Virginia democrats invoked the ACLU's demonstrably false claim that "people of color" constitute "55% of those currently on death row across the country."  Had the legislators seen fit to devote two minutes to on-line research to verify such claims, they could have learned that, on the contrary,  whites constitute 55.9% of those on death row, with blacks constituting only 41.6% (Id., Table 5).  Needless to say, however, the Virginia democrats had no interest in learning such inconvenient truths.

                                                

   Virginia dropping death penalty leaves prison guards to deal with the charming inmates so mercifully spared

     Nor did they consider what may be the most cogent, but least publicized, argument for retaining the death penalty, especially in the case of the most brutal and violent murderers.  This is the principle of specific deterrence -- i.e., the indisputable fact that brutal killers who are executed can never again murder or brutalize anyone. Period. 

     The significance of this factor was ironically underscored in a seemingly unrelated report published on the same day as the Virginia death penalty story. That report concerned the murder of an Indiana prison official by an inmate who had been spared the death penalty for prior murders -- to the extreme cost of the prison personnel charged with his supervision and maintenance.

     Death penalty abolitionists blithely discount the significance of this issue, apparently believing that life imprisonment is a sufficient punishment and deterrent for even the most heinous and menacing murderers -- think of the fictional Hannibal Lecter or, more seriously, his numerous real-life counterparts.  They also seem to believe that incarceration for life or its equivalent in a high security prison disposes of any argument that the unexecuted killer will no longer pose a fatal threat.  They are very wrong.

     In the recent Indiana case, the inmate was serving a 130-year sentence at a so-called "maximum security" prison for a triple murder in 2002.  Such prison security apparently proved inadequate, however, when the prisoner fatally stabbed one corrections officer and seriously injured another.  Had this inmate been sentenced to death and executed, the prison officials charged with his confinement health and maintenance would have been spared their own murder or maiming.  

     The Virginia legislators and governor who abolish the death penalty can pat themselves on the back and smugly walk safely away from the consequences of their virtue-signaling.  Not so, however, the corrections personnel who are left with the guarding, supervision, maintenance, feeding, and health care of the often dangerous and menacing monsters whose lives are spared by abolitionists.  It bears emphasis, moreover, to note that there is no remaining legal deterrent for inmates serving a life sentence in a state that has abolished the death penalty, other than possible solitary confinement (which some of such freaks might prefer).  The recent murder of prison officials in Indiana is merely the latest demonstration of this grim reality.

     The risk of harm or death to prison personnel is not the only reason why the specific deterrence of capital punishment was wrongfully overlooked by the Virginia legislature and governor.  As SR has demonstrated in a prior post, murderers spared the death penalty can and do escape from prison and expand the danger they present from prison personnel to the general populace.  The notorious 2015 escape of two convicted murderers in anti-death penalty New York, which endangered countless citizens and necessitated an enormous expenditure of state and federal personnel and financial resources, provides further emphatic proof that death penalty abolition entails costs and risks that legislatures like Virginia's cavalierly ignore, with potentially fatal consequences to the innocent.

     Thus, after the Virginia legislators and governor finish congratulating themselves for their "compassionate" abolition of the death penalty, prison guards, health care and food service personnel, and other corrections officials will be left to face the grave risks posed by the continuing care and feeding of society's most menacing murderers.  Perhaps exposing the legislators to the serious daily risks faced by the forgotten prison personnel would give them the perspective they lacked when they extended their misguided compassion to the Hannibal Lecters of Virginia.

U.S. Racial Obsessions Preclude Global Parity in Math and Science

     In an article posted in 2018 ("East Asia Defies Diversity Delusion"), SR reported how East Asian youngsters were trouncing their global peers (including the U.S.) in math and science performance measures.  The article further explored how countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were excelling in these and other measures of civilizational progress despite, or perhaps because of, their extraordinary ethnic homogeneity and corresponding lack of the diversity so highly valued in the U.S.

     The latest surveys by the Program for International Studies Association (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) again confirm that the East Asian STEM juggernauts -- Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and 4 China Provinces -- continue to vastly outperform other nations in math and science student performance, including the U.S.

     In the 2019 PISA Survey, for example, the East Asian nations took the top seven slots, with the U.S. ranked a lowly 37th.  In science, the U.S. ranked 18th, again badly trailing the East Asian nations as well as such western nations as Estonia, Finland, and Canada.

     In the face of these dismal global rankings, one would expect the U.S. would adopt stringent measures to bolster its youngsters' math and science performance.  On the contrary, however, U.S. education policy makers and governments seem determined to lower or eliminate standards of educational performance excellence in the interests of race-based affirmative action and proportional representation goals.  Global competitors such as China may be excused if they collapse in hysterical laughter at America's ludicrous, self-defeating educational priorities.

     As a prime example, U.S. school districts are in the process of subverting one of the few great successes in American secondary STEM education, the science and technology magnet school.  And they are doing so as an abject concession to bald racial politics, rather than for reasons of educational excellence.

     The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology ("TJ") in Fairfax County, Virginia, has been repeatedly rated the Number One high school in the United States, public or private. It is a public magnet school which, until this year, based admission on a rigorous series of competitive tests.  TJ is exactly the kind of school the U.S. needs to become more competitive with the East Asian and other educational paragons in the STEM fields.  Moreover, its student body has been about 79% minority, which one would think would favorably impress the educational bureaucrats and bean-counters.  Alas, however, TJ's minority students are predominantly Asian (i.e., about 70% of its students), which is apparently the "wrong" minority for Fairfax County's race-obsessed educational establishment.

                                             

The Model STEM School that Fairfax County Would Perversely Subvert

    One would think that the Fairfax County government and education officials would be extremely proud of a school that has been such a success as to be ranked number one nationally, and leave it well enough alone.  On the contrary, the inept, race-obsessed Fairfax County school authorities are instead calling for "agressive change" and insisting that TJ's admissions policies be "dramatically altered" in order to assure greater representation of blacks and Latinos, regardless of their ability to meet TJ's rigorous standards of admission.  

     Indeed, Fairfax County has forced TJ to eliminate its longstanding and deliberately demanding admissions test.  The same or similar dilution of admissions standards has been ordered for Virginia's 18 other magnet STEM schools.  Further, a similar race-based deconstruction of heretofore demanding magnet schools is occurring elsewhere in the nation, such as at New York City's Stuyvesant magnet high school.  

     In the case of TJ, at least, a group of stalwart parents is suing to prevent the fatal deterioration of the model school their children worked so hard to enter and experience.  They recognize that diluting TJ's admission standards will ultimately weaken the school's educational quality.  As one exasperated parent explained, "You cannot lower the standards of admission without lowering the standards of the curriculum."

     Sadly, the Fairfax parents are unlikely to prevail in their lawsuit and the exasperated parent's prediction is likely to prove true at TJ and other magnet schools similarly compromised:  the lowering of standards to assure enhanced representation of favored minorities will necessarily subvert the rigorous math and science curriculum.  And the U.S. will continue to lag ignominiously behind nations that would never compromise their educational standards for such misplaced priorities.

     Unfortunately, the movement to undercut the excellence of our leading magnet schools is not the only example of a disturbing trend towards sacrificing excellence in order to reduce or eliminate the so-called racial or ethnic gap in the educational attainments of American students.  

     An ultra-radical movement attacking the very concept of objective and accurate answers to math and science questions has surfaced in "progressive" educational circles, based on the ludicrous notion that such an objective focus is an outgrowth of the canard of "white supremacy."  It is difficult to imagine an educational approach more perfectly designed to exacerbate the performance gap that now exists between U.S. and East Asian students in math and science.

     This movement has been most prominently manifested in something called "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction."  This Equitable Math concept is being promoted by an educational organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  

     The Pathway approach seeks to eliminate such concepts as classroom discipline and "paternalism," requiring students to show their work, and, perhaps most outlandishly, the value and importance of correct or objective answers to math problems.  It ascribes these evils of the educational system to the leftist's bogus shibboleth of "white supremacy."  As the Pathway document states:  "White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when: The focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer. The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

     Ominously, the outlandish Pathway approach has not been confined to the abstract precincts of educational think tanks and journals.  The Oregon Department of Education, for example, has promoted a variant of the Pathway to Equitable Math in order to "dismantle racism in math."  Unsurprisingly, left-wing Seattle has followed suit, with a similar movement to integrate ethnic studies into its math programs.

     It is difficult to exaggerate the utter stupidity, venality, and sheer educational destructiveness of these programs and policies.  

     Perhaps the most telltale indication of their profound confusion is ascribing the focus on correct answers and rigorous objectivity in mathematics to "white supremacy."  The ethnically homogenous East Asian nations that so consistently and emphatically outperform predominantly "white" nations (not to mention nations of all other races) in producing correct answers to math and science questions would no doubt beg to differ with this peculiar notion.  If reaching such correct answers is an outgrowth of "white supremacy," how explain the fact that youngsters of the East Asian races reign supreme in these fields?

     The answer, of course, is that the rigorous pursuit of accurate and correct answers to objective math and science questions is not a function of race or ethnicity but rather of mental discipline, study, hard work, and determination.  If American educators seek to obscure this reality in their obsession with achieving delusional ideals of racial and ethnic parity they will not only undercut overall educational excellence in the U.S., but subvert genuine efforts to enhance the education of the very groups they seek to assist.