This is a good start: Governor Commutes Sentence in Texas. But still, it’s embarrassing that the US is right up there with China, Saudia Arabia, and Iran, which collectively account for 94% of all state-sanctioned executions of their own citizens. Why do we prefer punishment over rehabilitation? According to some studies cited in Wikipedia, sending people to prison actually increases their risk of offending, while rehabilitation is the only effective way of reducing repeat offenses. I think that one reason the US government prefers punishment is because punishment helps keep the powerful in their places by keeping the poor politically disenfranchised (they can’t vote when their in jail) and by scapegoating the poor for the problems in this society. If we instead invested the resources into rehabilitating so-called “criminals,” we would have to confront the high costs of rehabilitation, which would then lead us to question whether it might be cheaper to address the deeper problems that condition poor individuals to adopt criminal behaviors, such as educational and economic inequality (poverty and poor education correlate very strongly with likelihood of criminal behavior). But again, such investigations would lead to a critique of the capitalist and anti-democratic institutions that keep the rich and privileged in power. It’s a vicious cycle that we can only pull out of by persistently and collectively criticizing and organizing against capitalists and their lifestyles of excess.