Word: penal
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...Torture: a Worldwide Epidemic" [WORLD, April 16] makes two references to my country, which has been subjected to a campaign by the Western press to tarnish its image and reputation. In Iran, stoning is not a form of torture but a punishment officially sanctioned by Iran's new penal code based on the holy Koran and Islamic Sharia. It is not used against political offenders but against ordinary criminals guilty of serious offenses like adultery and pederasty...
...anguished outcries in New York and California concern the same problem: penal systems that too often free prisoners who seem obvious threats to society. But the two cases also illustrate how difficult solutions are. The parole system many New Yorkers are so eager to abandon could end up being replaced by one like the penal approach that governed the Streleski and White cases. In eleven states, including California, parole release has been abolished for most offenders in favor of a fixed, or "determinate," sentencing system. Under it, a judge must impose punishment from a narrow range of options...
...Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony...
Under the new law, the junta nullified all penal actions against both dissidents and the military who brutally suppressed them in Argentina's infamous "dirty war." The dissidents, however, have already been punished with a vengeance: most of them vanished during the dirty war. In effect, the military was absolving itself of its earlier atrocities. It even declared that anyone associated with those crimes could never in the future be "interrogated, investigated, cited or confronted." The umbrella law also applies to those who have already been convicted, including some 200 members of the armed forces...
Although Thatcher favors hanging, she probably does not regret last week's outcome. A return to the noose would have saddled the government with the task of redefining and reforming the nation's penal law so as to define the various conditions under which capital punishment would be applied. It would also have given Britain the dubious distinction of being the only country in Western Europe, except Turkey, to execute criminals...