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chaosmage  1yr ago (text post)   2514 thread views

Should lifetime prisoners be incentivized to kill themselves?

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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Ya lower the burden of proof and nab multiples to an order of magnitude more people, kinda based on crime, kind of on speculation... but make it nice, have pools, maternity ward... And don't make it so dour and metalic and institutional, you could have a nice open air town type setup... sure barb wire and guards around, but we could even let them have specialized work and band... it wouldn't be so much a prison... It'd be like going to Camp!

Oh wait...

Seriously this is what concentration camps are. This is what the British said they were doing to the Boer, what Canada and Britain did to Germans and Ukrainians in ww1, what the US did to the Japanese, and what the Gulags and Auschwitz at least nominally started off as when they were "merely" replicating the Tsar's prison camps and Germany's WW1 prison camps.

That sounds a lot more like an old-timey insane asylum. Conditions there were often horrific.

So? Are you implying that a human concentration camp is a special atrocity in a way that a hellish prison is not? To the extent we think concentration camps are bad at all, isn't it that we disagree with the reasons people were forced to be there? Why would violent crime make this list?

The horror of concentration camps was the loss of due process of law and basic rights of citizenship.

Once you can be deprived of freedom indefinitely with a crime being proven or even charged, merely the expediency of the state, well execution is also a punishment the state meets out.

If you can be imprisoned without a proper trial or due process, execution without trial or due process is merely a matter of degree.

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