Why Is Internment Morally Wrong

Although internment may have seemed like a simple answer to a problem that rapidly arose, it is a flawed ideal. Internment is faulted system that is not needed. The core purpose of the camps was to detain and monitor people of interest in order to ensure national security. However, there is already a fully established system designed for that very purpose: prison. Prisons have existed since before the Greeks and Romans. The American penitentiary system has matured as years have past. Prison is to be used for the detention of wrong doers who must receive the appropriate punishment⁠41 according to the eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Therefore, according to the law all citizens are innocent until proven guilty and are entitled to due process, a fair trial, and the appropriate punishment. There is no need for the middle man of internment since the prison system has not yet failed. Those who support the justification of the internment claim that since the …show more content…
Although Roosevelt may have been legally justified, he was not morally. To often politicians try to put a line between morality and legality. However, there is no line. Laws are made so that morality can be upheld. If there was no law against murder and someone killed another, it would still be said that that was wrong, because it was morally wrong. Benjamin Franklin stated that, “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”⁠44 Meaning that if people are willing to call military necessity in order to take the rights of others they also deserve to have those rights taken away. After much investigation in the early 1980’s, Executive Order 9066 was found to be unjustified by military necessity. Ultimately meaning that there was no need for the relocation.⁠45 Therefore, the internment was unjustified morally and