Veritas Forum: Mercy and Injustice in American Prisons

Alex Tuckness is a professor and Director of Graduate Education in the Department of Political Science at Iowa State, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the coauthor of The Decline of Mercy in Public Life, which examines why mercy is rarely used as a justification for decisions in law or public policy today. The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates of any large country in the world. Tuckness will argue our current justice system's lack of mercy owes more to modernity than to Christian influence, which is sometimes blamed for encouraging retributive vengeance and promoting harsh punishment. Veritas Forum