RELIGION AND SOCIETY

Religion and Society ~ 419 ~ structuring, mental disease, economic pressures, adverse social conditions, etc. Therefore, instead of the criminal being punished, he should be ‘treated’. These ideas proved so influential that more than three-dozen countries abolished the death sentence in the case of moral crimes. (It was still, however, considered necessary in the case of political and military crimes to retain the death penalty as a deterrent.) This approach to crime may have seemed more human, but it did not have the desired effect. Since the Second World War, crime has actually been on the increase, all the ‘treatment’ schemes having failed to restrain people from evil. The death sentence has even had to be reintroduced in places like Delaware and Sri Lanka where it had supposedly been abolished for good. It was only when on the 26th September 1959, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister, Mr. Bandara Naike himself was brutally murdered, that the lawmakers came to their senses. Immediately after the funeral rites, an emergency session of the Sri Lankan Assembly was called and, after a 4-hour discussion, the decision was taken to reintroduce the death sentence.