The Tender Mercies of the Wicked
Blog & Mablog
Canon Press
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
Let us begin with the death penalty. Because we refuse to execute the dangerous people who really should be executed, we wind up having to protect the general population by locking them up, and this has drifted into the practice of locking everybody up. This creates a huge apparatus of injustice.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tender Mercies of the Wicked, March 2nd, 2026. |
| 0:10.0 | Introduction. |
| 0:11.0 | Our criminal justice system is one that defiles both the jailers and the jailed. |
| 0:16.0 | It affects the jailers negatively and the society the jailers represent because of its manifest injustice. It defiles the |
| 0:23.1 | jail because we have just sentenced them to three years in a graduate school for crime, and most of them |
| 0:28.0 | were not in a good position to start with. Now, I should acknowledge at the outset that there are men in |
| 0:32.3 | these prisons who have done heinous things and consequently are serving a life sentence and no |
| 0:37.0 | possibility of parole and who are getting something life sentence and no possibility of parole, |
| 0:38.3 | and who are getting something that is far better than they deserve. |
| 0:41.3 | As will become apparent, I'm not urging prison reform through the mollycoddling of anybody. |
| 0:46.1 | What I want to argue for is going to seem far more severe, but it is actually going to be more measured and just. |
| 0:51.9 | Stick with me. If that is too much, try to stick with me. Around |
| 0:55.0 | 2 million people are currently incarcerated around the United States, locked up in dog kennels. |
| 1:00.2 | Two million. That is the equivalent taken together of the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska. |
| 1:05.7 | But they are out of sight and out of mind. This means that we can kid ourselves and assume that, of course, |
| 1:11.3 | we are being benevolent, enlightened, humane, and very modern. But I don't believe that this is how it comes out |
| 1:16.3 | in practice. Quote, a righteous man regarded the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked |
| 1:21.6 | are cruel. Proverbs 1210. A false savior. Our dog kennel system certainly had a noble purpose |
| 1:27.4 | at the beginning. Consider what we call our prisons. They are penitentiaries. They are places for the recalcitrant to be housed in order that they might become penitent. We first started calling them penitentiaries at the end of the 18th century as a result of some prison reform movements. This desire, fueled by a spirit of uplift, |
| 1:45.2 | ended up turning our criminal justice system into a false savior. The goal became fixing the |
| 1:50.4 | prisoner by means of hard work and solitude, so that he could reflect on his misdeeds and ascend |
| 1:54.9 | to a higher version of himself. But false saviors always let you down, and this one was no exception. |
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