The song is heroic because the song confronts death. The song is immortal and bravely stares down our own extinction. The song emerges from the spiri… - Nick Cave

My social conscience is fairly limited in a lot of ways; there's not much I'm angry about that doesn't affect me quite directly. But the prison system- not particularly capital punishment- but the penal system as it is, and the whole apparatus of judgement, people deciding on other people's fates... that does irritate, and upset me quite a lot. What angers me about the system goes beyond the unreliability of "proof"… it's that the way criminals are dealt with has nothing to do with rehabilitation and readjusting people who've stepped outside society's norms. The same goes for mental institutions and so forth. But it's also the very idea of someone being judged "criminal" or "insane" because they're unable to fit into what a corrupt society considers "social" or "sociable".

And the mercy seat is melting,
And I think my blood is boiling,
And in a way I'm spoiling,
All the fun with all this truth and consequence.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
And anyway I told the truth,
And I'm not afraid to die.

In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin,
Where the rain came down and leaked within,
A young mother frozen on a concrete floor,
With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw.