Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
12 January 2012
Punishment
Conservative Prison-
As the Canadian government moves forward with
building new prisons religious communities warn
locking up more prisoners is counterproductive
Associated with the French Revolution,
the guillotine is predated by earlier devices
invented for the same grisly purpose
Execution in the Electric Chair
The search for a humane way to kill convicted criminals leads to the invention of the electric chair
Gassing condemned prisoners with hydrogen cyanide
has gone out of style in favour of lethal injections;
that’s a good thing
Except for those subjected to it, execution by
hanging has been among the world’s most popular methods of ending the lives of criminals
Mostly with military executions, only a small
number of countries use shooting as a
way of carrying out capital punishment
For more than 20 years, Albert Pierrepoint was
the U.K.’s official executioner carrying out
the ultimate sentence more than 400 times
With Canada's Conservative government playing
the tough-
of capital punishment is beginning to stir debate
The United States is the only country in the Western industrialized world to still use capital punishment and the executions are carried out mostly by lethal injection
Rather than punishing criminals and using long sentences
to deter others, Denmark focuses on getting
the few people it does jail ready for life outside