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 -
It does if you don't fall in the lizardman constant. I guarantee you that outside weird rationalist forums, you'll find essentially nobody at all, and certainly no death penalty opponents, who say that there is an acceptable level of innocents killed by the state. Yes, if you do say that, my argument isn't relevant.
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