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Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

July 29, 2008 Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye By PATRICIA COHEN NY Times In the Albanian canon, a 15th-century handbook detailing the rules of revenge that is still in circulation, a man?s relatives are expected ?to take their blood back? if he is shot. In Iran a death can be compensated with blood money: 100 camels in early Islam; thousands of dollars today. A girl?s life is worth only half of a boy?s. So is an eye; a tooth, one-twentieth. In Sicily there is an oral tradition describing various methods of revenge: tying a man?s feet to his neck so that when he moves, he strangles himself; handcuffing a victim to a bonfire of olive wood; throwing him into a sty with hungry pigs. Today one can see vengeance on a mass scale embodied in the person of Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who is sitting in a Belgrade jail, charged with war crimes, including overseeing the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 at Srebrenica...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).