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Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of

Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of million. You can house a criminal for quite a long time before that money's spent. Further, the current version of incarceration has been shown to not help rehabilitate, yes. I totally give you that. But the current version of incarceration was never designed to rehabilitate. It was designed to securely lock people away for a long time, and that's about it. In pursuit of that goal, we've turned our prisons into a very scary place that (IMHO) does more harm than good. This isn't to say that every version of incarceration has to be evil in that same way. What if prisons were run with the specific incentive to rehabilitate people at all costs? This really hasn't been tried except in some very limited circumstances, though largely because it's political suicide. Sure, it may very well be the best thing long-term to spend a lot of time and money making criminals stop being criminal, but try explaining this to the father who saw his daughter raped by that animal while on national TV with him while you're running for president.

mkramlich 17y ago
Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc. I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.
- RevRal 17y ago
  I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone. It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.
  - mkramlich 17y ago
    If they didn't mean that killing someone costs a lot of money then they should not have said it. :) I was simply pointing out that killing can be be done pretty quickly and cheaply -- as cheap and quick as we as a society want. The same goes for whether and how imprisonment is carried out. As with many things in life, there are dials. We can adjust these dials.

mkramlich 17y ago

Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc. I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.

RevRal 17y ago
I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone. It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.
- mkramlich 17y ago
  If they didn't mean that killing someone costs a lot of money then they should not have said it. :) I was simply pointing out that killing can be be done pretty quickly and cheaply -- as cheap and quick as we as a society want. The same goes for whether and how imprisonment is carried out. As with many things in life, there are dials. We can adjust these dials.