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 -
Are your problems with the death penalty pragmatic or moral? If they are pragmatic, then as you point out this proposal is even farther outside the overton window and will never be implemented. If they are moral, then all I can say is that I think that if we as a society decide that someone should die we owe them the respect of shooting them in the head instead of bullying them into suicide with mind games or financial incentives to assuage our guilty consciences by only killing indirectly.
I agree with you on practical grounds and I don't think any kind of good policy can be of the wink wink nudge nudge kind as op suggests. The sorts of checks and balances that make the death penalty expensive are necessary for predictability and consistency. I suspect this option done with those checks is probably even more expensive than the existing options.
Morally however I think this proposal is actually an improvement as it gives the prisoner more of a choice, something current death row inmates don't get. Of couse there's a whole can of worms there around how much of a choice is a choice. I'm personally okay with bribery which is in the interest of social good but not with blackmail. Others may differ in opinions there.
There have been societies where suicide is an option presented to and taken by many criminals (Classical Greece and Rome, Premodern China and Japan), but these societies were all much more shame-based than our own, and were places where the stain on one's family reputation and the posthumous treatment of one's children, spouse, friends, etc. could be noticeably improved by choosing to do "the honorable thing." I think you would need that sort of understanding hardwired into the culture before people would accept this particular bargain, and simple bribery just doesn't carry the same weight as all of society, your ancestors, and the gods pressing down on you to do it.
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