The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.
I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?
It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?
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Notes -
No.
If you want a longer answer: hell, no!
If you want to chinstroke about "but whyyyy", I suggest you try the cup of hemlock and see how you like the taste.
Damn it, every time I think "I'm really overdoing the Chesterton quotes", someone comes along and provokes me:
Hey diddley dee, we're too damn cowardly to straightforwardly execute criminals, so we'll torment them till their lives are so unbearable that they kill themselves. But we're not boiling the oil ourselves, oh dear no! It just happened to heat up all by itself.
EDIT: And before you go "But I never said anything about torment, I said a cash money figure to encourage the 'fell down the stairs' situations", if you think people will go along with paying money to the relatives of violent criminals, you haven't thought this through. We're already wanting to save money by having them kill themselves, much easier (and much easier also to appeal to the vicious streak in all our natures, masquerading as wanting justice) to drive them to do it rather than pay them. Society is already fucked-up enough, let's not encourage amateur torturers who will drool at the notion of having guinea-pigs to practice their art on - and all in the name of "value for society by getting rid of the worst scum", to boot.
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