Nellie Bly Quotes
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. Ian L. Munro, 1887.
It is unfortunately too common that people have been convicted and jailed because of misconduct of the police or prosecutors. Most criminal justice agencies in recent years have examined their methods and procedures and reforms are in progress. But there is still a human problem. For an example see Quote
After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat hundreds of Egyptian religious fundamentalists were rounded up, jailed and tortured. al-Zawahiri broke under torture and revealed the names of some of his anti-government associates. Although he was not personally involved in the murder of Sadat, he served three additional years in jail. Motivated by has thirst for revenge at his torturers and his guilt at having been forced to betray his friend, he learned all he could about terrorism from the older Jihadists also in the same jail, and when he was released he elevated Islamic terrorism to another level by developing a strategy for the use of suicide bombers.
“Catiff” is a Middle English term to describe a lowly, despicable person.
England, and most other countries of Europe, had put people who could not pay their debts in prison. When our founding fathers formed the constitution, they too saw debtors’ prison as an acceptable concept. 11 years earlier Congress had outlawed Federal Debtors’ Prisons. However many states and local governments then still had them. Smith wanted them abolished completely. What is fascinating about this quotation is that although the head of a religion, Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
Action he advocated to his followers who attacked and killed pro-slavery advocates in Kansas. The civil war of Kansas was over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state of a free state. If a free state, the free states would be able to block further slavery. If Kansas were to become a slave state, the slave states would have a sufficient majority to make all future expansion hospitable to slavery. The slavery forces started sending man and families into Kansas so that they could vote; the abolitionists did the same. Both sides armed and a war began with each faction trying to kill or drive the other faction out of Kansas before the vote. See {617388} and {612516}.
This quotation is often incorrectly ascribed to Joseph Stalin whose approach to dissidents comported with Monteverde.
This has been the case in EVERY jurisdiction that has had capital punishment. Capital punishment does provide vengeance for victims, relatives and society. And in many societies execution is less expensive than prison for life. But it has never curtailed crime despite the example. In London, they used to have public executions as examples to inhibit crime. While the crowd was watching a pickpocket be hung, other pickpockets were relieving many spectators of their wallets and watches.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, industrialist, inventor, and charity worker who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.
