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The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
I guess I’ll bite on the last point.
I think killing a person is relatively but not absolutely wrong. We deprived this man of his liberty and eventually life because it was the only way to protect the rights of (would-be) victims. Since we can’t predict recidivism, we’re stuck with this approximation.
I am giving equal weight to life and liberty, here, but I’m not feeling confident in that. Outside of pragmatic concerns like cost and false positives, do you think life imprisonment is categorically more moral than killing?
I think there are cases where it's justified to kill someone. I'd refer to aquinas' just war theory as being illustrative. Every death is a tragedy, but there are times where causing a lesser tragedy serves to prevent a greater. But note that I specified "helpless" person. Which-- relative to the carceral system-- inmates are. In older, meaner times, when society had fewer surplus resources, the relatively higher difficulty for the state to efficiently contain criminals made the death penalty more justifiable. But in the modern context, that's simply not the case.
So yes, I believe life imprisonment (where technically feasible) is more moral than killing. I wouldn't try to life-imprison an enemy soldier in the middle of a firefight, but I would absolutely prefer to imprison rather than execute them after their capture.
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It's not as if we are running out of them. They are renewable resourse.
Revenge is a nice meal, when restoration is impossible.
The resources spending raising a child are not that much. And are sunk anyway. The whole theater of appeals and waiting is expensive. It should be more expeditive. And cut the exotic execution methods. Bullet to the back of the head is fast, efficient, and cheap.
Of course it's expensive-- society is will to accept a very low P[innocent of murder|executed for murder] rate. What false positive rate are you willing to accept?
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The cost of prison v the pecuniary benefits from hard labor is probably a net negative. Maybe though if prisoners had to do really truly hard labor (at pains of extreme punishment) prisons would be easier to manage (since no one would have the energy) AND there would be a larger disincentive to commit crime.
This is why for lower level crimes I support public flogging. I think you get probably more disincentive without the deleterious impact of jail.
Weirdly enough, I agree with you about the public flogging. It's also the reason I think arguments in favor of the death penalty fall apart on practical grounds. Carceral systems that include flogging as an alternative or supplement to fines and lengthy prison sentences demonstrate that it's possible to make fundamentally different tradeoffs about how we administer justice.
If you assume we're keeping everything the same about the current system, then the death penalty is verifiably a net economic negative. There's little evidence it is, in its current form, much of a deterrent, and it costs a lot of money to establish someone's guilt to the required standard. If you assume we're going to change the system somehow, to require a higher threshold of surety for guilt but also a lower threshold of double-checking to reduce costs... then why not assume we can change the system in other ways? I refuse to believe we can't engineer a way to make an entire adult human productive enough to be worth maintaining.
The death penalty isn't about material economy. It's about political economy. The people are naturally bloodthirsty. They used to walk long distances to see hangings and breakings on the wheel. They feel a visceral satisfaction in the pain of wrongdoers. It's primal.
Now, we are rational creatures. We can override our base impulses or have them overridden for us for our own good. We don't have to indulge our bloodlust. But denying it carries a cost. Sparing the worst of the worst from the ultimate reprisal has a big psychic cost, since it's a powerful emotion you're overriding.
A state can only spend so much entry in a continuous fight against human nature. Why should we spend our resources on kindness on jurisprudence instead of in inducing some other non-default beneficial behavior?
If we're talking about political economy, The People also hate hate hate to hear about innocent (or at least, insufficiently proven-to-be guilty) people being executed. They're also mad about people being falsely imprisoned, but to a far lesser degree.) There's no objective reason we should be spending our resources to satisfy the vengeance-lovers over the mercy-lovers, and plenty of practical reasons why we wouldn't want to encourage "vengeance" as a core value of our society.
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We as society will eventually admit that Heinlein was right for everything in Starship troopers. Unfortunately misunderstanding the book and decrying it as fascism is prerequisite of one's ascension to the IYI class.
I don't think Heinlein believed that the Terran Federation was right about everything, or even most things. His actual politics were a lot more libertarian than the politics expressed in Starship Troopers. The book doesn't even answer (and the fandom is deeply divided on) the fundamental question about how the Federation actually works because we only see it during an existential war - is the normal form of Federal Service participation in a large peacetime standing army, or is it more like the WPA but with military discipline?
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I find that position even worse for a different reason. The “if there’s any doubt at all, we can’t execute” standard also guarantees that by the time we actually execute someone, it’s extremely expensive and decades after the fact. The delay removes any deterrent from the act of execution as by the time you actually execute him, most people have no idea what crime he committed or the details of the crime. At least in the bad old days of either the Old West, or Dark Age Europe you didn’t generally have to remind the public of the crime that happened twenty years ago. You knew he’d murdered someone because you had just recently heard about the crime. Public executions would seem a reasonable thing if the goal is to deter crime.
This what I'm always saying. The death penalty is expensive because we let it be so. It would be really cheap if we just hanged them 20 minutes after conviction right outside the courthouse.
Justice only has deterrent value when it creates credible fear in potential criminal's minds. The most important way is certainty -- most criminals think they won't be caught. But inflicting the image of hanging corpses on public streets on the public would certainly keep the thought in their minds.
I mean yes certainty, but also temporal nearness. Having a situation where a guy sentenced in 2000 doesn’t have the sentence executed until 20 years later absolutely kills the deterrent effect of the execution because the time frame is longer than humans are biologically able to process. Even 5 years for most people is a vague “long time from now’ thing. And most criminals have shorter timeframes than the average person. And again, if you’re talking about a crime that happened two decades ago, most people have long since forgotten the crime.
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See the Jaremy Smith case in SC. 5 years in prison, 7 more for hostage taking during a breakout attempt.
Released on Dec 1st 2003 for "good behavior".
Murdered a woman and a police officer in March 2004.
No amount of labor you get out of that thing will make up for the risk some "progessive justice" ghoul will release it on the public to kill again. A rapid death penalty is the only way to remove the threat they present to their victims.
It would be nice if we had the power to peacefully incapacitate them so they could make up for the harm they've caused, but it's simply not possible when large parts of the justice system are dedicated to freeing violent criminals.
You could have made this point without calling people “it” or insisting that your outgroup are ghouls. But no, you’re doing the always-popular thing, deciding that this time, the behavior is so egregious that normal rules don’t apply.
We’ve warned and banned you repeatedly for this. We’ve permabanned better users for the same thing. Consider this one month ban your final warning.
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No amount of labor? Consider that statement very seriously. Would you seriously have executed that man if he were otherwise guaranteed to cure every form of cancer?
Everything about the justice system is an expected value calculation. If you let at most ten guilty men go free to save a innocent, you're implicitly saying that the risk of them committing crimes is outweighed by the good the innocent person could do. And you're also saying that an innocent person is worth less that the expected value of letting eleven criminals go free.
There are other problems with imprisonment for innocent people. A big one is that the state needs to have credibility on both ends. On the one hand (where the modern states fail IMO) is that it has the capacity and will to deal with actual crimes in a way that protects public order. When people have no reason to suspect that the government can and will deal with crime, you end up with various ad hoc solutions to crime that can escalate to the point of vigilante justice. On the other hand, a state that cannot reliably prosecute only the guilty or at least mostly the guilty (with the errors being mostly good faith mistakes) is one that loses public trust rather quickly. If I think that I’m going to be persecuted for thought crimes with a random prosecution, I’m not going to trust the police. You might not call on them and you might resist them. And the loss of trust is a detriment to stopping crime. This is why the defund movement is making crime worse. When you tell an entire population that the police exist to persecute them, they don’t cooperate and crime increases in that area. Then those people end up victimized by the criminals riding free because the cops are not trusted.
In case it's non-obvious, I'm making an argument about optimizing for expected efficiency, rather than saying there's any agreement about how many innocent people we would knowingly condemn to prison in order to keep guilty people imprisoned too. My claim is that we already make implicit cost-benefit calculations about what sort of false negative/false positive rates we're willing to accept from the justice system. Which, in turn, implies that we must also be placing an implicit, finite cost on how much damage we think particular crimes actually cost.
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No; there's also the harm of the imprisonment/execution of the innocent itself, and the second-order effects (you do not want the civilian population en masse to start treating the justice system as an occupying army).
I'm abbreviating for conciseness. Of course there's a lot of other factors that go into what false positive/negative rates we optimize our justice system to accept, like the risk of a justice system being seen as "soft" encouraging vigilantism and the degradation of state power.
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It seems like you started with the moral presupposition from your last paragraph, and then reverse-engineered a convenient argument that you can attempt to use on people who don’t share that moral presupposition. In other words, you would still oppose the death penalty even if it was cheap and we could demonstrate to you that it is a net economic benefit. Your stated concern is not your actual concern; therefore, you are concern trolling.
If your concern is that we spend too much money raising children to adulthood, how would you feel about a regime in which we attempt to identify, as early as possible, juveniles who will turn out not to be worth the investment, and begin a quickly-escalating regime of corrective punishment on them once they first start misbehaving, such that if they fail to shape up we stop devoting said resources to them? Most of the guys on death row started their life of crime in their early teens. It was pretty clear from an early age what sort of adults they would amount to. Why let them stick around long enough to escalate their level of criminality into full-blown murder? Start flogging them in the public square, denying them access to the internet and other services, cut off pinky fingers and move up from there - see if that’s enough to get them back on course to a productive life. If it’s not, end it before it gets too bad for the rest of us.
Yes. And? I want something from you. Does it make more sense for me to offer something I want, or something you want in return for it?
Are you seriously pissed off that I'm not assuming you should share my values and arguing from them?
If so, here's your argument: "Pope said so, Q.E.D."
He’s upset because he thinks you’re wearing his values like a skin suit. You were honest about it, but he still finds the practice disturbing.
That said, y’all are starting to get heated. I’m going to recommend dropping the subject for now.
I don’t think I am “upset”, nor do I think things are getting “heated”. I would hope I haven’t said anything yet that will get me a mod warning. I think I’ve been very civil, or at least as civil as one can be while accusing an interlocutor of being dishonest.
Sorry. By “upset” I meant “objecting.” You are not being warned, and I appreciate that you’ve remained civil.
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Who said I’m “pissed off”? What I’m saying is that you’ve outed yourself as a liar. You’re willing to cynically lie to your interlocutors about this issue because you have an axe to grind. Therefore, we can apply considerable skepticism to any “evidence” you bring to bear to try and trick us into supporting your position. You bring some statistics purported to demonstrate that executing prisoners instead of enslaving them is a net economic negative? Okay, why should we trust that your statistics aren’t doctored or misrepresented?
Again, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t actually care if that reason is true, because it’s not your actual reason for opposing the death penalty. It’s just something you latched onto because you thought we would care about it. So if it’s not true, it doesn’t move the needle for you at all. It’s not like you’re going to switch to supporting the death penalty if you discover that whatever study you’re citing isn’t accurate or replicable.
I can't wholly discount the possibility that my more fundamental beliefs about the sanctity of life have biased me towards believing evidence and arguments that present my anti-execution position as fulfilling both my values about utilitarian economic efficiency and my values about deontological behavior. And yes, since my deontological values are more fundamental than my utilitarian values, I would still be anti-death-penalty even if I thought it wasn't a utilitarian evil. But I was in no way being dishonest-- I genuinely believe everything I said about alternatives to the death penalty. I would prefer lifetime imprisonment over hard labor for everyone on track to receive the death penalty because of my utilitarian and deontological beliefs about slavery, but I would be happy to accept hard labor as an improvement to killing people.
As for your last accusation-- that I don’t actually care if that reason is true-- you are also completely wrong. It's true that I would ultimately be happy if you stopped supporting the death penalty regardless of why. (Though I'd privately think you were an idiot if you said something ridiculous, "lifetime imprisonment causes more net suffering" or alternatively the exact position I complained about in my original comment about people who are pro-execution but anti-government.) But I have practical objections against lying in arguments, and specifically in this case if you somehow managed to convince me that the death penalty was a utilitarian good versus alternative punishments I would reprioritize my time and emotional response. There's plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian evil but moral good, and plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian good but moral evil. Given that it's much harder to change peoples' minds on either of those categories, I prefer to focus my time on the slam-dunks that are both utilitarian and moral evils.
/u/Netstack if I haven't sufficiently toned down the heat of my rhetoric, please tell me and I'll stop responding to this subthread in general.
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Same reason you trust people who do share your values? Reputation, mostly.
Most sources aren’t load-bearing. Most beliefs don’t even have a load-bearing source to present! Discrediting the false ones is still appropriate.
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I reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.
Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.
The kind of labor that can be efficiently done by slaves is mostly done even more efficiently by machines these days, and prison guards cost a lot more than just hiring society's existing pool of the poorest(voluntarily out of the probation office if need be). Forced labor outside of the third world is mostly sex work these days and that's for a reason which doesn't have much to do with human kindness.
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The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.
Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.
The enslaved soldiers definitely would have still been out-group after being enslaved, and if anything more prone to massive violence. You're correct that executions were also common, but I don't think either of us have the data to talk about "standard practice" in this case. And yet, an argument that says, "hard labor cannot be more efficient than execution" required a preponderance of the evidence, while my position (that hard labor can be made to be more efficient) requires only a collection of positive examples, regardless of how representative they are of average behavior.
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Forced labour probably doesn't pay for itself if you have to pay the man with the whip a first-world middle-class salary. The gap in productivity between a slave and a free worker has grown a lot larger a society has got more productive.
The cost to feed/house/guard a prisoner in the US is significantly higher than the annual earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker, which is roughly the value you can extract from a forced worker (and more than you can get competing with the 3rd worlders on MTurk). The Nazi forced labour systems (the concentration camps that were not extermination camps, the Jewish ghettos, the forced labour of kidnapped French boys in Germany) were profitable, but the workers were not getting enough food for long-term survival, and the guards were cheap conscripts.
I'm almost absolutely positive it could. The carceral system-- and in particular the prison labor system-- is inefficient because it has misaligned incentives at every level due to a complete lack of consensus about its actual goals plus institutional inertia from times with totally different values. If we're talking about making dramatic reforms anyways (which would be required to significantly streamline the process of executing criminals) then we could orient things towards actually making the existence of prisoners net remunerative for society.
Uh, imprisonment in the US is ridiculously expensive, and that's mostly security costs which don't exactly get easier if the prisoners are doing hard labor.
Our justice system is expensive because it's poorly designed. Or rather, because it wasn't designed-- because it's just a long pile-up of compromises with no guiding ethos. And yet, despite that, if we assume we're not going to redesign it, then imprisonment is still cheaper than the death penalty. If we assume we are going to redesign it, then why no redesign it so that criminals directly repay their contributions to society?
People demand that prisons be punitive while at the same time squeamish about the exact nature of punishment. Of course that leads to poor optimization for economic efficiency. We could get a lot more efficient use out of prisoners if we were a lot more judicious about exactly which rights we chose to violate, while at the same time not losing our heads if the same measures end up making prisoners happy. For example, encouraging moderate cocaine use but then predicating their supply on being productive and compliant.
(I'm not saying that specific intervention would solve our problem, just using it as an example of the sort of measure no one is even willing to consider.)
I'm also addressing your comment here:
... with the above. Historically, slaves did plenty of complicated, specialized work that required a surprisingly high level of education. In rome,
That in the modern day compelled labour is typically done by people with only the desire for and ability to compel uncomplicated work doesn't mean we'd have to stick to that paradigm. We imprison plenty of lawyers, hedge fund managers, accountants, scientists, etcetera. It shouldn't be impossible to convince them to do work that's on net beneficial to society even if we have to pay them with cash or reductions to their sentences.
No we don’t. Rome captured some scribes as slaves, it’s pretty rare that a person commits a worthy-of-imprisonment crime while even able to work a factory job, let alone something high paying.
I'm not saying "plenty of" in terms of "proportion of the total population." I'm saying "plenty of" in terms of absolute numbers. I suspect many of those people would be happy for time off their sentences in return for working in the field they're trained for on behalf of the government.
Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's sort of exactly what we do with hackers already-- there's an existing pipeline from "black hat hacker" to "government spook."
And "worthy of imprisonment" crime is a measure biased towards people who commit crimes with an impact toward a few, specific individuals, rather than e.g. financial crimes that often have vastly more impact than your average armed robbery but result in far less jail time.
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Indeed.
So these prisoners toiling under the lash had better all be full time employed professional workers for the labor camp to break even.
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I guess the question is do you need the work to be economically viable? Maybe if prisoners were forced to do non pecuniary very hard work for 12 hours a day prison would be a much worse place to be and prison might be easier to manage (since the inmates would be exhausted).
This was tried in various forms in England in the 19th century after the Victorian Gold Rush attracted enough free settlers to Australia that convicts were no longer welcome there. (The legal term was "imprisonment with hard labour"). It failed because in order to be effectively punitive for people from the kind of rough background that produces criminals, hard labour needed to be hard enough to kill a significant fraction of the people assigned it.
The Victorians were perfectly comfortable hanging criminals who committed capital offences, and there was a lot of capital offences. So working criminals to death for less-than-capital offences was ultimately rejected as cruel.
Ok, but the American underclass isn't used to doing backbreaking labor. Bosses prefer Guatemalans for a reason.
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The gulags had lots of disciplinary problems despite prisoners being literally worked to death on a regular basis.
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