I'm Eric Carter from Georgetown College, from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
and my colleague Steve Baby, the same department, Georgetown College Sociology and Anthropology.
We just wanted to talk a little bit about the death penalty in our opposition to death penalty.
One of the big things sociologically speaking is thinking about how the death penalty is very tied to race in class.
Just like the prison system is very racialized.
So we see a lot of discrimination in terms of who is on death penalty and who is potentially murdered by the state for crimes,
whether they committed them or they did not commit them.
The other thing is just how expensive it is in terms of the death penalty versus keeping somebody in prison for life
and the potential for rehabilitation is what we're really interested in talking about how we can alter the system to rehabilitate and empower folks
instead of spending so much money trying to keep people on death row.
It really doesn't make that much sense to us.
And if we think about it very structurally, you begin to see the barriers that exist for folks of color and along class lines.
So we can really begin to see how the social forces push people in certain positions in terms of who is going to be on death row and potentially murdered by the state.
And I just wanted to bring up the Christian perspective here.
George Sean College is Christian campus. People are on both sides of the issues.
But from our perspective, we're completely pro-life, which means being against the death penalty.
We take very seriously Christ's word when he shows up on the scene and says that he's bringing here to speak the good news,
which is for the poor, the disenfranchised and those who are in prison.
And those who are in prison and on death row are among the very least of these.
And I don't think most Christians who are pro-death penalty really consider often that Christ died of the death penalty.
The cross in many ways is the modern day death chair or batch of the liquid that puts people to death for his political outspoken words.
And there's again, we brought up tied to that the innocence of Christ and the number of innocent are on death row.
So for both sociological reasons and for Christian reasons, we are against the death penalty.
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