8 ms·

I find it really odd how many people abhor the death penalty and capital punishment as a whole, while also tolerating life in prison and solitary confinement. I

I find it really odd how many people abhor the death penalty and capital punishment as a whole, while also tolerating life in prison and solitary confinement. I don't view executing someone as worse than forcing them to spend their entire life living in a concrete cell, under the mercy of cruel guards, until they die. Especially if that process includes year long stints without seeing a single person. Perhaps we should have neither? I understand that many people are uncomfortable with having someone who committed a heinous crime walking free, but there should be some way of giving back one's freedom and one's humanity after a while. Someone who committed a crime at 19 is a wholly different person at 50. Even if we can't give them total freedom, there should be an opportunity to live in nice conditions, to earn a proper income, to cook one's own food.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
petemir 4y ago
Well, perhaps they actually believe that executing them would relieve them from their punishment…
Justsignedup 4y ago
I think neither is an important answer, but to reach neither, we have a lot to do: 1) we need a lot of counseling to the family. The ability for the family to feel safe and move on from the trauma is critical. Otherwise the cycle continues. 2) We need a lot of counseling and empathy training for the perp. The ability to understand what they did, and feel remorse past just the consequences faced is critical. The craziest thing I've seen is when a guy was part of an armed robbery, and due to technical reasons didn't serve any time. He ended up turning everything around and becoming a massive boon to the community. The point here is we need to do what is right to society. 3) We need to take a person-by-person approach to rehabilitation. 4) We need to invest a lot of time into rehavbilitation spychaiatrists and groups vs just criminalization. This works in many countries. The sweedish island prison where every prisoner there feels honored to be given a chance at a productive life rather than incarceration. There are no walls, guards, escapes. There is only rehab. This is an incredibly complex and nuanced problem that doesn't sound wonderful yelling from a podium for political points. But that's the point, real change is hard and nuanced.
arbitrage 4y ago
You're focusing on justice for the person who committed the crime. What about justice for the person or people who were victims of the crime? What about justice for the society in which the crime took place? While the perpetrator may be a wholly different person now, what if not everyone agrees that a crime, or the consequences of that crime, can be expiated so easily?
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Isn’t that just revenge seeking and why America’s criminal Justice system is so messed up compared to Europe? If we focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, we would probably get better results for society, than focusing on punishment to appease the victim and their family’s needs for punishment? How do we balance rehabilitation and punishment properly? Right now, the USA seems to do it very poorly.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    In many places in Asia the penalties for crime, and conditions for inmates, make American prisons look like a resort. It's frequently little more than intentional sadism. For one commonly known example in Japan death row inmates are kept in absolute solitary confinement and never told when they're too be hanged until one day a guard walks in, and they're dangling from a rope a few moments later. Imagine hearing that gate swing open and the approaching footsteps, over and over and over. It could be your next meal, or the rope. There's also greater than 80% support for capital punishment, and implicitly this system, in Japan. Yet crime rates, especially violent crime, are practically zero. And what violent crime does exist is almost entirely inter-personal (argument turns violent, deal gone bad, etc) as opposed to random. The obvious explanation for all of this is simply that people are different. And consequently, mimicking the methods of a country with a meaningfully different population is highly unlikely to result in mimicking their results.
    - texaslonghorn5 4y ago
      what are you arguing? that the Japanese system is worse so united states should just suck it up?
cmsonger 4y ago
I think there are two issues you don't address. Death is final. There's no later exoneration if you've killed someone and it seems pretty clear that this has happened. State and federal governments have executed innocent people. The second is that content of this article itself. The author does not sound thrilled to be in solitary; but the author also seems to have found meaning in life. Do you think that the author would choose death over the life he has forged for himself? I don't think so.
- hardwaregeek 4y ago
  Oh agreed. Death is not a good option. I'm mostly saying that life in prison, especially in American prisons, is not a good one either.
  - cmsonger 4y ago
    Agreed. The US has some weird priorities in my estimation.
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I can’t speak for the author, but I would absolutely choose death over life imprisonment if given the choice (assuming a painless method of execution)
  - Fidgeting0026 4y ago
    I'd take the pain anyway.
  - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
    Some people live most of their lives "imprisoned": maybe they're blind, deaf, paralyzed, have birth defects, chronic pain/illness. But even they value life within limitations. There is always a reason to keep going. Perspective is everything.
gizmo686 4y ago
Even if you don't want to give up life in prison; it doesn't have to be as horrendous conditions as US prisons are.
dazc 4y ago
> Someone who committed a crime at 19 is a wholly different person at 50. Not necessarily, some people are just bad or damaged to the extent that they can not live a normal life within society. I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another. There has to be a sanction for this kind of destructive behaviour and the remote chance that some random violent criminal has a potential to be to be some of saint, if only they have one more chance, is robbed of this opportunity is a price worth paying for the greater good..
- chki 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly disagree. People can change and people do change. People can receive therapy. I was a very different person 5 years ago. I can't imagine how I will change in the next 20.
  - dazc 4y ago
    People can change but mostly the don't. If someone let you down 5 years ago they will, most likely, let you down again.
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    With a 40% reconviction rate after prisoners are released [1], I think it's reasonable to assume a lot of them will keep misbehaving. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6743246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6743246/
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  Well they don't need to be a saint, as none of us are. They just need to learn how to function in society. I think rehabilitation is possible for the majority. Norway seems to show this in that they do not instate capital punishment or life imprisonment, yet have extremely low recidivism rates (especially compared to the US).
  - 4y ago
twelve40 4y ago
on the other extreme, across the pond you have a guy who murdered 77 teenagers and kids, and is chilling in a hotel-like facility with a good chance to be out in 2033. I'm really not sure what's worse.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  There’s no chance he gets out in 2033 but the ability for level-headed decisions about continuing effectiveness on all prisoners is absolutely something we should emulate.
- chki 4y ago
  > a good chance to be out in 2033 Source needed. From what I've read he will probably never be free, which makes sense since he is actively dangerous.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    If he repents, he can be free - after everything he has done. He currently chooses not to.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      Citation needed. This does not match anything I’ve read about the situation.
    - hither_shores 4y ago
      It's not up to him. "Preventive detention" is still potentially a life sentence, it just has to be renewed by the court every five years after the initial 21 year sentence is up.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    It seems wrong for him to ever get out of prison, even if he wasn't viewed as actively dangerous.
    - 4y ago
edmcnulty101 4y ago
cpsns 4y ago
I would rather death than life in prison, much less life with years of solitary mixed in. I don't understand how the inmates deal with it, or why many prefer to live such an awful existence compared to a quick end. Life in prison, especially an American prison sounds like its own form of hell. All of my energy would go into "checking out" if I found myself in that situation. It's not worth living at that point.
darawk 4y ago
The biggest reason I oppose the death penalty, but am less opposed to the other two is that the death penalty is irreversible. I think the death penalty is warranted for some crimes. I feel pretty good about executing someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, for example. What I don't feel good about is the certainty of our courts results. And until we have courts that produce perfect or near perfect verdicts, I wouldn't be comfortable employing an irreversible punishment.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  Or the fairness or cost of the death penalties application.
- Xelynega 4y ago
  How is sending someone to prison for 50 years "reversible"?
  - darawk 4y ago
    You can at least let them out if/when you discover their innocence.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    If you choose to send them to prison for 50 years, you can reverse the decision three years down the line if circumstances change (e.g. the real culprit gets identified), which is something that has happened.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > The biggest reason I oppose the death penalty... is that the death penalty is irreversible. While true, there are better reasons to oppose the death penalty.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_Stat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_capital_punishment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_capital_punishment_in...
  - 4y ago
Ratanka 4y ago
- sahila 4y ago
  Is the long waiting period a necessary condition for capital punishment, or can it be shorted to something more reasonable?
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    IIRC the capital punishment is fast if the prisoner does not present court appeals, but most people prefer to try to use all the methods to avoid it.
    - Ratanka 4y ago
      no it isnt ... thats just stupid to say if u again have no idea what ur talking about. alot of states in us as example have all death penalties on "Hold" it can change every day and after 20 years BAM u get executed and also even if ur "lucky" its often 5+ years ... to say its "fast" is just again ... false
  - Ratanka 4y ago
    first of all you have to wait until the appeals are trough thats noraml but then alot of states in the us have the killings on hold for decades and then kill a bunch most often when some republicans are back in power. also the MAIN reason is that they are just missing the poison to kill people ... thats also why killing people in the usa is the most inhuman killing in the world, the people get injected by poison but its only created in europe and europe bans all delivieres to the usa as they not support killing of citizens with it. and thats why the usa uses a bunch of other stuff not rly working there was a case a few years ago where the person was struggeling with death screaming for 20+ minutes ... so humane ... so nice
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's a condition of the weird schizophrenic system in the US. There's nothing preventing a system where "I sentence you to death" is said by the judge and the bailiff immediately unholsters a desert eagle and executes.
krisoft 4y ago
> Perhaps we should have neither? There is a scifi concept in the Culture book series. It is called a slap drone. The society described in the books is a post-scarcity society. Nobody has to commit crimes out of economic desperation. Still there are some who hurt others (crimes of passion, mental disturbances, etc). They don’t throw these people into a prison but assign a robot guardian to them to prevent them hurting anybody ever again. And that robot guardian is called the slap drone. There is an element of prevention: the robot is faster, smarter, and better armed than the convict is, therefore can prevent any further undesired behaviour. This is where the name “slap-drone” comes from. In most circumstances a convict never threatens anyone again. But if and when they do a simple slap is often enough to stop them. And there is an element of punishment: the drone hangs out with the comvict all the time and warns others about what you have done. (Either verbaly or by just its very presence.) Which results in others being more cautious around the convict. Perhaps the convict is then not invited to the best, most exlusive parties and so on. And this social stigma acts as a deterent for others. Clearly we are nowhere near able to produce such a robot. Many other things would be different about our societies if we could. It is not a practical proposal in any way, but I kinda like it as a thought experiment. Showing that there are possible ways we could handle crime more humanly maybe one day.
staticautomatic 4y ago
I think this gets at the most important question implicating the death penalty: what do we we do with people who can presumably never be allowed back into society?
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is a small portion of the prison population, and we have vast deserts and remote islands available; something could be done for them that is not freedom but is not perpetual solitary confinement, either. I feel that most of the death penalty support left is some weird form of virtue signaling; that if "raped to death by a cactus" was on the menu they'd be howling for that punishment.
Waterluvian 4y ago
> I find it really odd how many people abhor the death penalty and capital punishment as a whole, while also tolerating life in prison and solitary confinement. This is a false dichotomy describing a fictional group of people. What many people really want is no death penalty, and a proper, effective carceral system. There’s many countries who get this fairly right.
mind-blight 4y ago
I really like the Norwegian model where the maximum sentence is 21 years, and a judge has to actively intervene near the tone of release if they want to extend it. Requiring action to keep someone incarcerated rather than released makes it harder to forget about people and let them sleep through the cracks

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

petemir 4y ago

Well, perhaps they actually believe that executing them would relieve them from their punishment…

Justsignedup 4y ago

I think neither is an important answer, but to reach neither, we have a lot to do: 1) we need a lot of counseling to the family. The ability for the family to feel safe and move on from the trauma is critical. Otherwise the cycle continues. 2) We need a lot of counseling and empathy training for the perp. The ability to understand what they did, and feel remorse past just the consequences faced is critical. The craziest thing I've seen is when a guy was part of an armed robbery, and due to technical reasons didn't serve any time. He ended up turning everything around and becoming a massive boon to the community. The point here is we need to do what is right to society. 3) We need to take a person-by-person approach to rehabilitation. 4) We need to invest a lot of time into rehavbilitation spychaiatrists and groups vs just criminalization. This works in many countries. The sweedish island prison where every prisoner there feels honored to be given a chance at a productive life rather than incarceration. There are no walls, guards, escapes. There is only rehab. This is an incredibly complex and nuanced problem that doesn't sound wonderful yelling from a podium for political points. But that's the point, real change is hard and nuanced.

arbitrage 4y ago

You're focusing on justice for the person who committed the crime. What about justice for the person or people who were victims of the crime? What about justice for the society in which the crime took place? While the perpetrator may be a wholly different person now, what if not everyone agrees that a crime, or the consequences of that crime, can be expiated so easily?

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Isn’t that just revenge seeking and why America’s criminal Justice system is so messed up compared to Europe? If we focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, we would probably get better results for society, than focusing on punishment to appease the victim and their family’s needs for punishment? How do we balance rehabilitation and punishment properly? Right now, the USA seems to do it very poorly.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  In many places in Asia the penalties for crime, and conditions for inmates, make American prisons look like a resort. It's frequently little more than intentional sadism. For one commonly known example in Japan death row inmates are kept in absolute solitary confinement and never told when they're too be hanged until one day a guard walks in, and they're dangling from a rope a few moments later. Imagine hearing that gate swing open and the approaching footsteps, over and over and over. It could be your next meal, or the rope. There's also greater than 80% support for capital punishment, and implicitly this system, in Japan. Yet crime rates, especially violent crime, are practically zero. And what violent crime does exist is almost entirely inter-personal (argument turns violent, deal gone bad, etc) as opposed to random. The obvious explanation for all of this is simply that people are different. And consequently, mimicking the methods of a country with a meaningfully different population is highly unlikely to result in mimicking their results.
  - texaslonghorn5 4y ago
    what are you arguing? that the Japanese system is worse so united states should just suck it up?

cmsonger 4y ago

I think there are two issues you don't address. Death is final. There's no later exoneration if you've killed someone and it seems pretty clear that this has happened. State and federal governments have executed innocent people. The second is that content of this article itself. The author does not sound thrilled to be in solitary; but the author also seems to have found meaning in life. Do you think that the author would choose death over the life he has forged for himself? I don't think so.

hardwaregeek 4y ago
Oh agreed. Death is not a good option. I'm mostly saying that life in prison, especially in American prisons, is not a good one either.
- cmsonger 4y ago
  Agreed. The US has some weird priorities in my estimation.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
nicoburns 4y ago
I can’t speak for the author, but I would absolutely choose death over life imprisonment if given the choice (assuming a painless method of execution)
- Fidgeting0026 4y ago
  I'd take the pain anyway.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Some people live most of their lives "imprisoned": maybe they're blind, deaf, paralyzed, have birth defects, chronic pain/illness. But even they value life within limitations. There is always a reason to keep going. Perspective is everything.

gizmo686 4y ago

Even if you don't want to give up life in prison; it doesn't have to be as horrendous conditions as US prisons are.

dazc 4y ago

> Someone who committed a crime at 19 is a wholly different person at 50. Not necessarily, some people are just bad or damaged to the extent that they can not live a normal life within society. I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another. There has to be a sanction for this kind of destructive behaviour and the remote chance that some random violent criminal has a potential to be to be some of saint, if only they have one more chance, is robbed of this opportunity is a price worth paying for the greater good..

chki 4y ago
I wholeheartedly disagree. People can change and people do change. People can receive therapy. I was a very different person 5 years ago. I can't imagine how I will change in the next 20.
- dazc 4y ago
  People can change but mostly the don't. If someone let you down 5 years ago they will, most likely, let you down again.
- rafaelero 4y ago
  With a 40% reconviction rate after prisoners are released [1], I think it's reasonable to assume a lot of them will keep misbehaving. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6743246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6743246/
virgildotcodes 4y ago
Well they don't need to be a saint, as none of us are. They just need to learn how to function in society. I think rehabilitation is possible for the majority. Norway seems to show this in that they do not instate capital punishment or life imprisonment, yet have extremely low recidivism rates (especially compared to the US).
- 4y ago

twelve40 4y ago

on the other extreme, across the pond you have a guy who murdered 77 teenagers and kids, and is chilling in a hotel-like facility with a good chance to be out in 2033. I'm really not sure what's worse.

mikeyouse 4y ago
There’s no chance he gets out in 2033 but the ability for level-headed decisions about continuing effectiveness on all prisoners is absolutely something we should emulate.
chki 4y ago
> a good chance to be out in 2033 Source needed. From what I've read he will probably never be free, which makes sense since he is actively dangerous.
- twelve40 4y ago
  If he repents, he can be free - after everything he has done. He currently chooses not to.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Citation needed. This does not match anything I’ve read about the situation.
  - hither_shores 4y ago
    It's not up to him. "Preventive detention" is still potentially a life sentence, it just has to be renewed by the court every five years after the initial 21 year sentence is up.
- googlryas 4y ago
  It seems wrong for him to ever get out of prison, even if he wasn't viewed as actively dangerous.
  - 4y ago

edmcnulty101 4y ago

cpsns 4y ago

I would rather death than life in prison, much less life with years of solitary mixed in. I don't understand how the inmates deal with it, or why many prefer to live such an awful existence compared to a quick end. Life in prison, especially an American prison sounds like its own form of hell. All of my energy would go into "checking out" if I found myself in that situation. It's not worth living at that point.

darawk 4y ago

The biggest reason I oppose the death penalty, but am less opposed to the other two is that the death penalty is irreversible. I think the death penalty is warranted for some crimes. I feel pretty good about executing someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, for example. What I don't feel good about is the certainty of our courts results. And until we have courts that produce perfect or near perfect verdicts, I wouldn't be comfortable employing an irreversible punishment.

strangattractor 4y ago
Or the fairness or cost of the death penalties application.
Xelynega 4y ago
How is sending someone to prison for 50 years "reversible"?
- darawk 4y ago
  You can at least let them out if/when you discover their innocence.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  If you choose to send them to prison for 50 years, you can reverse the decision three years down the line if circumstances change (e.g. the real culprit gets identified), which is something that has happened.
Maursault 4y ago
> The biggest reason I oppose the death penalty... is that the death penalty is irreversible. While true, there are better reasons to oppose the death penalty.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_Stat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_capital_punishment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_capital_punishment_in...
- 4y ago

Ratanka 4y ago

sahila 4y ago
Is the long waiting period a necessary condition for capital punishment, or can it be shorted to something more reasonable?
- gus_massa 4y ago
  IIRC the capital punishment is fast if the prisoner does not present court appeals, but most people prefer to try to use all the methods to avoid it.
  - Ratanka 4y ago
    no it isnt ... thats just stupid to say if u again have no idea what ur talking about. alot of states in us as example have all death penalties on "Hold" it can change every day and after 20 years BAM u get executed and also even if ur "lucky" its often 5+ years ... to say its "fast" is just again ... false
- Ratanka 4y ago
  first of all you have to wait until the appeals are trough thats noraml but then alot of states in the us have the killings on hold for decades and then kill a bunch most often when some republicans are back in power. also the MAIN reason is that they are just missing the poison to kill people ... thats also why killing people in the usa is the most inhuman killing in the world, the people get injected by poison but its only created in europe and europe bans all delivieres to the usa as they not support killing of citizens with it. and thats why the usa uses a bunch of other stuff not rly working there was a case a few years ago where the person was struggeling with death screaming for 20+ minutes ... so humane ... so nice
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's a condition of the weird schizophrenic system in the US. There's nothing preventing a system where "I sentence you to death" is said by the judge and the bailiff immediately unholsters a desert eagle and executes.

krisoft 4y ago

> Perhaps we should have neither? There is a scifi concept in the Culture book series. It is called a slap drone. The society described in the books is a post-scarcity society. Nobody has to commit crimes out of economic desperation. Still there are some who hurt others (crimes of passion, mental disturbances, etc). They don’t throw these people into a prison but assign a robot guardian to them to prevent them hurting anybody ever again. And that robot guardian is called the slap drone. There is an element of prevention: the robot is faster, smarter, and better armed than the convict is, therefore can prevent any further undesired behaviour. This is where the name “slap-drone” comes from. In most circumstances a convict never threatens anyone again. But if and when they do a simple slap is often enough to stop them. And there is an element of punishment: the drone hangs out with the comvict all the time and warns others about what you have done. (Either verbaly or by just its very presence.) Which results in others being more cautious around the convict. Perhaps the convict is then not invited to the best, most exlusive parties and so on. And this social stigma acts as a deterent for others. Clearly we are nowhere near able to produce such a robot. Many other things would be different about our societies if we could. It is not a practical proposal in any way, but I kinda like it as a thought experiment. Showing that there are possible ways we could handle crime more humanly maybe one day.

staticautomatic 4y ago

I think this gets at the most important question implicating the death penalty: what do we we do with people who can presumably never be allowed back into society?

bombcar 4y ago
This is a small portion of the prison population, and we have vast deserts and remote islands available; something could be done for them that is not freedom but is not perpetual solitary confinement, either. I feel that most of the death penalty support left is some weird form of virtue signaling; that if "raped to death by a cactus" was on the menu they'd be howling for that punishment.

Waterluvian 4y ago

> I find it really odd how many people abhor the death penalty and capital punishment as a whole, while also tolerating life in prison and solitary confinement. This is a false dichotomy describing a fictional group of people. What many people really want is no death penalty, and a proper, effective carceral system. There’s many countries who get this fairly right.

mind-blight 4y ago

I really like the Norwegian model where the maximum sentence is 21 years, and a judge has to actively intervene near the tone of release if they want to extend it. Requiring action to keep someone incarcerated rather than released makes it harder to forget about people and let them sleep through the cracks