Revenge is an interesting way to put it. Question; if, upon finding a defendant guilty of a severe enough crime, they were instantly and automatically transpor

Revenge is an interesting way to put it. Question; if, upon finding a defendant guilty of a severe enough crime, they were instantly and automatically transported to a foreign island not under the control of the state, would the government have a duty to deliver food and other amenities to them? That is to say, are the people of a nation morally obliged to provide for people that they no longer want to be part of their community? If your answer is no, and no other country will take in the person found guilty of the crime, then what is the government supposed to do? If your answer is yes, that's quite a strange position to me. It prioritizes the needs of criminals above that of law-abiding citizens (as, with rare exceptions, a law-abiding citizen is unlikely to have their physical needs met in such a manner by the state). Why should your tax dollars go towards the care and housing of a person who has proven themselves eager and able to murder you if the opportunity arose? Also, you have either misunderstood or altered my premise. Regarding the first part, It's not that the life of an inmate has no value; my premise is that said life costs more to preserve than the education and healthcare that could be provided to dozens or hundreds of people for every year that said inmate languishes in prison. I'm comparing the QALY's of a prisoner with others. Life imprisonment as an intervention fails to maximize social utility and fails at the task of killing fewest people because, after all, (regarding the second part) everything that a government does kills people. A state that spends 2 billion dollars on housing death row inmates is choosing not to spend that money on improving its education, infrastructure, social programs, healthcare systems, and everything else it can do that save lives. Hence why I mentioned the identificable victim bias; people on death row feel more like victims than the hundreds of people that will freeze to death in the streets because of a lack of housing, or when wildfires consume their homes, or because higher taxes and regulations have stalled out the economy and left them destitute and hopeless. They are killed by neglect rather than direct action, but they are dead all the same. The American prison complex is an inhumane travesty, and life imprisonment is one of its worst failures. It is the worst compromise possible between those who see the system as fundamentally reformatory, and those who see it in talionic terms. It is maximum punishment at maximum cost.