Positive Sociology

I'm about halfway through "The Dating Game Killer" by Stella Sands.  The book follows the serial killing career of Rodney Alcala, who got his name after appearing on the Dating Game during his spree of murderous violence across Southern California in the late '60s.  Alcala is a sadistic psychopath This book is a difficult read for many reasons.  At a basic level, it's difficult to read because Alcala is one of the most sadistic serial killers that I have read about.  He would strangle his victims to the brink of death and then let them revive before strangling them again.  And he was notorious for sodomizing his victims (who were mostly young women and children) before killing them, leaving them in grotesque and humiliating sexual poses.    But, his story is also difficult to read because it challenges one of the basic, progressive ideas behind rehabilitative sentencing.  The "rehabilitative model" suggests that prison should be a place t...