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Treating prisoners like animals isn't showing compassion for anyone, neither the criminals nor their victims. Refuting the claim that even criminals should be treated humanely by saying we should also show compassion for victims is not logical.

The victims of crimes absolutely should receive much empathy and compassion. They should receive free and unencumbered medical (including mental health), legal, and financial support to help them reconstruct themselves. Paid for by the community. They should be guaranteed safety, even more than the rest of the population.

That is compassion. Harvesting their aggressor's heart and brain for teaching purpose, on the other hand, is not.

> But the point would be better made if some compassion was shown towards the victims instead of only ever showing compassion to the criminals.

This is not about compassion for any criminals. They're dead anyways. This is about the families of the deceased who find that someone has been cutting away at their dead relative.

A person may become a criminal, but they will never stop being a person. Stop trying to find a way around human rights.

There's a conflation in the South between:

- Temporary civil death limitation on freedoms and rights for conviction of a crime

- Temporary punitive treatment including substandard healthcare, poor sanitation, , lack of climate control, lousy food, solitary confinement, unpaid forced labor, and lack of rehabilitation services.

- Permanent civil death and punitive discrimination in housing, voting, and job applications for the individual (if they were to serve their time and leave alive).

- Lack of professional minimal humanity shown towards the dead inmates' family who aren't necessarily guilty by association.

You can tell everything you need about a society from what they do to the people they have power over. The state has a RESPONSIBILITY to the people that they have taken COMPLETE CONTROL over. That isn't about compassion, it's about what kind of society you have.

> FWIW there are western countries where the corpse of any dead human being can be used for scientific experimentation, unless specified otherwise.

Examples?

>There is an international trend to move from explicit consent (opt-in) to presumed consent (opt-out) policies for deceased organ retrieval: Chile (2010), Finland (2010), Greece (2013), Uruguay (2013), Wales (2015), Colombia (2016), Iceland (2019), the Netherlands (2020), England (2020), Scotland (2021), and the province of Nova Scotia in Canada (2021) have implemented opt-out policies. Switzerland is presently considering it, and Australia, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Romania, and several states in the USA had been discussing this as well.[0]

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.27.21262033v...

As far as I'm aware, none of the listed western countries (except Chile, whose status as a "western" country is dubious) allow the use of organs for 'scientific experimentation' without consent. Additionally many of the listed countries (Finland, Greece, ...) require attempts to ascertain consent for those organ donations, which means asking family members of the deceased.

You are right. I read the comment wrong.

What changes would you make to this article to show greater compassion towards the victims of violent crime?

> What changes would you make to this article to show greater compassion towards the victims of violent crime?

Your comment made me curious about Brandon Dotson's crime. I can't find a lot of info for it, I haven't started delving into legal databases, but I was able to gather several sources that state Brandon Dotson was sentenced to 99 years for a Class C felony (Burglary) + a parole violation. There might not even be other people involved in the crime he was convicted for. Sentencing someone to life in prison for burglary, even with a parole violation, seems needlessly cruel.

Alabama's sentencing guidelines for a Class C felony are between 366 days and 10 years. The man served 19 years (and is now dead).