Thank-you for an interesting article!
IMO Louisiana needs to be spending more money on rehabilitating people and not just incarcerating.
Society in general needs to be spending more money on mental health research as it pertains to criminals. Studies have been done that show there are physical differences in the brains of people with antisocial personality disorder as well as how social interventions as a child may affect how the person may act as an adult. We spend all sorts of money treating cancer and other physical disorders and searching for cures, while at the same time often ignoring that many of our criminals are mentally ill or have a brain abnormality and have been given a death sentence or life in prison because they were born with a physical disorder in their brain. Just as people don't choose to be born with a physical disability or developmental one, science is just discovering that many criminals have been born with brains that are not the same as that or a "normal" person. Usually the area that controls emotion is different than that of a "normal" person.
I don't condone criminal activity. I just think that as a society we owe it to other human beings to help discover why they may act differently, or show no remorse, or have committed some of the crimes that they did. I doubt that most of them would have wished to be born in to a life where they were deemed a freak and a wild animal who needed to be caged the rest of their lives. After all, it could have been any one of us born with the same brain abnormality.
Here is a link to an interesting article on brain scans and includes a case where a brain scan of an individual was used in court.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4189638...rain-scans-reveal-criminal-mind/#.T_cTZJHwkg-