The US had really, really bad crime in the 1980's and 1990's. In a lot of large American cities, infamously including New York, things like street muggings were literally a fact of life that nearly everyone had faced one time or another. I'm not aware that things ever got that bad in Europe; it's not fair to criticize our solution to a problem Europe hasn't even had.
Why were things so bad? We're not a culturally homogenous society, so we have lots of oppressed classes of people who are more likely to turn to crime. We have a history of high immigration and a history of puritanical, prohibitionist laws, which means organized crime from all over the world can easily gain a foothold here.
And, unlike Europe, large parts of America were basically frontier less than 150 years ago. The "wild west" wasn't as violent as you see in movies, but it wasn't a very nice place, either, and harsh measures were sometimes necessary. A lot of American sentiment on capital punishment dates from these times, and these circumstances which Europeans haven't been familiar with for centuries.
Pragmatically, the American justice system (capital punishment and long sentences included) does a very good job at containing criminals. We can be fairly certain that as long as someone is in prison, or dead, they are not going to go on and commit more crimes.
Frankly, the bulk of the problem in America has been urban gang violence. You can't fix that by rehabilitating individuals, because gang violence isn't an individual crime. Sure, brain malfunctions might explain individual criminals. They don't explain entire criminal subcultures. They can't all have brain damage, they just live in a culture where gangs are normal. Any human will do violent and terrible things to fit in with the culture that surrounds them.
As for the jury system, Americans consider jury trials to be just as fundamental to democracy as elections. Of course juries can be swayed by emotion--but if you only allow trained, expert judges to pass verdicts on a trial, by that same reasoning, shouldn't you only allow trained experts to choose your country's leaders? After all, voters can be swayed by emotion, too.
On another note, I'm curious as to how the justice systems you're talking about would handle criminals like Timothy McVeigh or Charles Manson. Don't you think that someone who kills children with truck bombs, or arranges a series of murders in order to incite a race war prophesied in Beatles lyrics, is too dangerous to be let go? A lot of experts believe that true psychopaths can't actually be rehabilitated--at best, they only learn how to fool therapists into believing they're healthy again. How is that handled?
Why were things so bad? We're not a culturally homogenous society, so we have lots of oppressed classes of people who are more likely to turn to crime. We have a history of high immigration and a history of puritanical, prohibitionist laws, which means organized crime from all over the world can easily gain a foothold here.
And, unlike Europe, large parts of America were basically frontier less than 150 years ago. The "wild west" wasn't as violent as you see in movies, but it wasn't a very nice place, either, and harsh measures were sometimes necessary. A lot of American sentiment on capital punishment dates from these times, and these circumstances which Europeans haven't been familiar with for centuries.
Pragmatically, the American justice system (capital punishment and long sentences included) does a very good job at containing criminals. We can be fairly certain that as long as someone is in prison, or dead, they are not going to go on and commit more crimes.
Frankly, the bulk of the problem in America has been urban gang violence. You can't fix that by rehabilitating individuals, because gang violence isn't an individual crime. Sure, brain malfunctions might explain individual criminals. They don't explain entire criminal subcultures. They can't all have brain damage, they just live in a culture where gangs are normal. Any human will do violent and terrible things to fit in with the culture that surrounds them.
As for the jury system, Americans consider jury trials to be just as fundamental to democracy as elections. Of course juries can be swayed by emotion--but if you only allow trained, expert judges to pass verdicts on a trial, by that same reasoning, shouldn't you only allow trained experts to choose your country's leaders? After all, voters can be swayed by emotion, too.
On another note, I'm curious as to how the justice systems you're talking about would handle criminals like Timothy McVeigh or Charles Manson. Don't you think that someone who kills children with truck bombs, or arranges a series of murders in order to incite a race war prophesied in Beatles lyrics, is too dangerous to be let go? A lot of experts believe that true psychopaths can't actually be rehabilitated--at best, they only learn how to fool therapists into believing they're healthy again. How is that handled?