These are quite fun, I hope you don't mind the influx of these sorts of chapters. It helps me get things off my chest, and I like hearing what you all think too.

Anyway.

This is a social and ethical topic.

The Death Penalty.

In the UK, we have effectively abolished the death penalty, save for anyone who commits treason (which is not really common, let's be honest).

We have come a long way with our punishment system, bearing in mind that in the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries, we had roughly 225 crimes punishable by death, which was really quite ineffective. I mean, you could be hanged for cutting down a tree, killing another person, or stealing a handkerchief. Honestly, anyone would have thought we were trying to cull most of our population with the Bloody Code . . .

And yet, people are dissatisfied with our punishment system these days. No one has been legally killed in this country since the 1970s/1980s (can't remember which off the top of my head) and prisons have become our best solution.

No more transportation to Australia and America, no more public executions, no more borstals. Nope, now you can sit happily in a free-roam prison with access to television, the Internet, game consoles, recreational sports and social activities, while the victims of your actions are left wondering where the hell the justice is! Sounds fair, right?

Of course, if we did change this, the remaining question would be: how do we dispose of these criminals? Hanging? Electric chair? Lethal injection, like in America? Or should we just shoot them? Maybe we can dump them on some island in the middle of nowhere and let them starve . . .

But is that justice?

Whether you live in the UK or not, I want to ask your opinion on whether or not the death penalty should be brought back into our constitution. People get the leisure of living in our prisons after taking money, taking lives and taking the piss, really. So, without further ado . . .

Do you think the death penalty should be reintroduced into British society?

Absolutely.

No way.

Not my country, not my problem.

If you couldn't already tell, I have a strong opinion on this subject, and I have every right. Allow me to present the case of James Bulger to you to try and help you understand.

James was a two-year-old boy, taken from his mother while her back was turned for only seconds while they were shopping. Two boys of ten years thought it would be fun to take this child, acting as though he was their brother so no one got suspicious, and eventually leaving him, beaten, bloody and bruised, on a set of train tracks.

Tracks that a train was using.

James tragically died, but what happened to the boys who took him and killed him, you ask?

They were given a life sentence--so a poxy sentence of around twenty years, thereabouts--and were released as expected.

James was killed in the early 1990s.

These two boys, now men, are back in our society.

But the thing that disgusts me the most about this case is that these two men have now received new identities to protect them, courtesy of the money we pay in taxes.

Um, I don't think so.

I can't even begin to think of what James' family was going through when they lost the boy, let alone when they found out his killers had been released with new identities. Where's the justice of it?

And of course, what happens next? One of the killers becomes a repeat offender and is back in jail! Of course he is!

So you see, it's because of cases like this that it's worth considering if the death penalty is actually useful and a deterrent. If we implement it for those who, say, have been repeat offenders and have taken the lives of more than one person with no reason, then perhaps we may see a change in our society. We don't want to ever, ever hear of a case like James' again.

The death penalty is not feared because it doesn't exist. Call me old-fashioned, but maybe it's time for us to prove to those who think it's OK to take away our friends and family from us that their reward will not be a TV and a cosy bed behind bars . . .