God Arises
Religion and Society
~ 419 ~
structuring, mental disease, economic pressures,
adverse social conditions, etc. Therefore, instead of
the criminal being punished, he should be ‘treated’.
These ideas proved so influential that more than
three-dozen countries abolished the death sentence
in the case of moral crimes. (It was still, however,
considered necessary in the case of political and
military crimes to retain the death penalty as a
deterrent.) This approach to crime may have
seemed more human, but it did not have the
desired effect.
Since the Second World War, crime has actually
been on the increase, all the ‘treatment’ schemes
having failed to restrain people from evil. The death
sentence has even had to be reintroduced in places
like Delaware and Sri Lanka where it had
supposedly been abolished for good. It was only
when on the 26th September 1959, Sri Lanka’s
Prime Minister, Mr. Bandara Naike himself was
brutally murdered, that the lawmakers came to
their senses. Immediately after the funeral rites, an
emergency session of the Sri Lankan Assembly was
called and, after a 4-hour discussion, the decision
was taken to reintroduce the death sentence.
