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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Thank you for elaborating, that makes more sense.
Fair, even I have a point where I say "to hell with the utilitarian calculus, this must be punished harshly" (i.e even if somehow just making murder legal provided a drastic reduction in what we would currently call murders I still wouldn't be able to stomach such a state of affairs).
My only pushback would be that I do not consider this particular point arbitrary, because while for the rest
there is still possibility of a downside to committing another crime to reduce the chances of being caught for the first- yes, maybe they'll opt to take their chances with the death penalty to reduce their chances of life imprisonment or any imprisonment etc, but once the punishments are equal it is ALWAYS "correct" to commit any additional crimes that reduce the chance of being caught by any amount.
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