Jennifer Horgan: Placing punishment on top of social inequality is a policy failure
In the 1980s, the state began sending young (predominantly northside) men, still in their teenage years, to Spike Island — often for the crime of joyriding. When Spike Island closed, young men were sent up to Dublin, to Mountjoy, where more serious drug-related connections were made.
US President Donald Trump has forever championed the death penalty. In 1989, the property mogul took out full-page ads across New York newspapers, calling for the execution of the Central Park Five — a group of black and Hispanic teenagers wrongly accused of beating and raping a female jogger.
Their exoneration (by DNA and the confession of a convicted rapist and murderer) failed to move the man towards compassion. He wrote: "I want to hate these murderers, and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them."
