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1) The state shouldn't kill people, flat out. That's an ideological thing so I'm sure it won't be convincing to you.
2) Our justice system wrongfully convicts people all the time. And wrongfully sentences people to death. And there's a major racial disparity there. Give the state a tool and you have to think about how it will function all the time, not just in any particular case.
Making policy based on extreme circumstances leads to bad things.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
As a conservative I'm naturally in favor of the "punishment" side of our legal system. Rehabilitation is great and something that America greatly needs to improve upon but I think that some people shouldn't be offered that chance (i.e., ones that have committed crimes so inhumane/depraved as to warrant the death penalty).
Example- a Pennsylvanian woman adopted a teenage orphan together with her boyfriend, then raped and murdered her over the course of over 20 hours as part of a shared sexual fetish. I believe that what these two have done puts them beyond any conception of mercy or leniency and that they should be put to death as soon as possible.
Most of you here would probably disagree. So I ask you, how can you rehabilitate monsters like these? Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt?
Perhaps most importantly, why should we let those who kill children live? This also applies to other particularly evil crimes- slavery, serial rape, serial murder, cannibalism, etc.
Because it is more expensive.
Why should society spend it's limited resources on your revenge?
It's not actually a cost-saving measure to sentence people to death, unless you eliminate all the measures in place in our system that is supposed to ensure that only those guilty of the most heinous of crimes are actually executed (and even then, of course, it is far from perfect).
It's not actually a cost-saving measure to sentence people to death, unless you eliminate all the measures in place in our system that is supposed to ensure that only those guilty of the most heinous of crimes are actually executed (and even then, of course, it is far from perfect).
Another thing to keep in mind is the huge subjective factor in death penalty/ life without parole cases that allow racial/class/gender bias to make decisions unjust.
+3
21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
As a conservative I'm naturally in favor of the "punishment" side of our legal system. Rehabilitation is great and something that America greatly needs to improve upon but I think that some people shouldn't be offered that chance (i.e., ones that have committed crimes so inhumane/depraved as to warrant the death penalty).
Example- a Pennsylvanian woman adopted a teenage orphan together with her boyfriend, then raped and murdered her over the course of over 20 hours as part of a shared sexual fetish. I believe that what these two have done puts them beyond any conception of mercy or leniency and that they should be put to death as soon as possible.
Most of you here would probably disagree. So I ask you, how can you rehabilitate monsters like these? Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt?
Perhaps most importantly, why should we let those who kill children live? This also applies to other particularly evil crimes- slavery, serial rape, serial murder, cannibalism, etc.
Bolded what i find most egregious.
"Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt"?
Well, that can apply to a lot of things. Like healthcare or education. And then, it requires people to decide who deserves to have resources spent for and who doesn't. Should we write off entire wings of human society because the odds of them succeeding by themselves are slimmer? I find that to be utterly monstrous.
I have a question for you, @Captain Marcus: Why should we punish people?
Knowing that punishment is not a good way to change people's behaviors, what good is punishment?
So, i guess i have two questions, why should we punish people and who decides who is not worth spending resources on?
As a conservative I'm naturally in favor of the "punishment" side of our legal system. Rehabilitation is great and something that America greatly needs to improve upon but I think that some people shouldn't be offered that chance (i.e., ones that have committed crimes so inhumane/depraved as to warrant the death penalty).
Example- a Pennsylvanian woman adopted a teenage orphan together with her boyfriend, then raped and murdered her over the course of over 20 hours as part of a shared sexual fetish. I believe that what these two have done puts them beyond any conception of mercy or leniency and that they should be put to death as soon as possible.
Most of you here would probably disagree. So I ask you, how can you rehabilitate monsters like these? Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt?
Perhaps most importantly, why should we let those who kill children live? This also applies to other particularly evil crimes- slavery, serial rape, serial murder, cannibalism, etc.
I don't shed any tears when somebody who is legitimately a monster is put down. I don't oppose the death penalty in principle.
The problem with the death penalty as a national policy is that these cases, as sensational as they are, are exceedingly rare. As much as we would like the death penalty to be reserved to the serial rapists and cannibals, that would mean there would be a lot of empty gas chambers around the country, and bureaucracy abhors a vacuum. Criminal justice institutions have a funny way of reinforcing their own existence by expanding their domain - when a state doesn't have enough Ted Bundys to keep death row busy, the criteria for qualifying for the death penalty will slowly erode until we're executing a mentally disabled dude over a murder committed when an armed robbery went wrong.
We've shown ourselves to be incapable of implementing the death penalty fairly, consistently, with appropriate restraint. I not sure if we ever will be.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
It's not actually a cost-saving measure to sentence people to death, unless you eliminate all the measures in place in our system that is supposed to ensure that only those guilty of the most heinous of crimes are actually executed (and even then, of course, it is far from perfect).
This argument has a dark side to it.
We spend more money on the death penalty because we spend more resources on confirming the guilt of those on death row. Consequently, death row inmates have a much higher exoneration rate than life sentence inmates.
This suggests we have a lot of people serving life sentences who are innocent. while this is not as horrible as a death sentence, it's still pretty damn horrible.
This leads to a strange paradoxical possibility: if we were to abolish the death penalty, without redistributing the resources spent on death penalty appeals to other felony appeals, the number of innocent people who die while incarcerated is likely to go up. Instead of being put to death, they simply sit in prison for years until they die of natural causes, institutional infections, or violence.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
It's not actually a cost-saving measure to sentence people to death, unless you eliminate all the measures in place in our system that is supposed to ensure that only those guilty of the most heinous of crimes are actually executed (and even then, of course, it is far from perfect).
This argument has a dark side to it.
We spend more money on the death penalty because we spend more resources on confirming the guilt of those on death row. Consequently, death row inmates have a much higher exoneration rate than life sentence inmates.
This suggests we have a lot of people serving life sentences who are innocent. while this is not as horrible as a death sentence, it's still pretty damn horrible.
This leads to a strange paradoxical possibility: if we were to abolish the death penalty, without redistributing the resources spent on death penalty appeals to other felony appeals, the number of innocent people who die while incarcerated is likely to go up. Instead of being put to death, they simply sit in prison for years until they die of natural causes, institutional infections, or violence.
Not just that but also separate facilities and increased staffing since death row prisoners don't have any real reason to follow the rules.
+1
Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
"Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt"?
Well, that can apply to a lot of things. Like healthcare or education. And then, it requires people to decide who deserves to have resources spent for and who doesn't. Should we write off entire wings of human society because the odds of them succeeding by themselves are slimmer? I find that to be utterly monstrous.
Cannibals and rapists are not "entire wings of human society". The more money is spent on trying to bring them back into human society (that may I remind you they purposefully distanced themselves from) the less money that is available for the rest of us.
I have a question for you, Captain Marcus: Why should we punish people?
Knowing that punishment is not a good way to change people's behaviors, what good is punishment?
So, i guess i have two questions, why should we punish people and who decides who is not worth spending resources on?
A. Punishment enacts a price from criminals for their behavior. You take something from someone else (possessions, life, choice of sexual partner) and society takes something from you. Depending on what you took the cost can be something small like a fine or a few days in jail or it can be the rest of your existence via life in prison or execution. It is separate from rehabilitation and the two can occur at the same time.
B. Society? That's kind of why we have sentencing laws, and societal representatives that come up with them.
The problem with the death penalty as a national policy is that these cases, as sensational as they are, are exceedingly rare. As much as we would like the death penalty to be reserved to the serial rapists and cannibals, that would mean there would be a lot of empty gas chambers around the country, and bureaucracy abhors a vacuum. Criminal justice institutions have a funny way of reinforcing their own existence by expanding their domain - when a state doesn't have enough Ted Bundys to keep death row busy, the criteria for qualifying for the death penalty will slowly erode until we're executing a mentally disabled dude over a murder committed when an armed robbery went wrong.
That's very true and I agree wholeheartedly. I'd love to see a system where the right to seek the death penalty is transferred over to Federal prosecutors and they'd step in in cases like this one. It shouldn't be a "states' rights" issue. There could be a single country-wide location for executions and a vastly cut-down appeals process- the death penalty is only so expensive because the cases get dragged out over decades. Yes, I know there's a racial disparity, and yes a small handful of innocent people do get caught up in it, but if you limited the death penalty to outrageous crimes like these I feel the chance of race or innocence coming into it is slim to none.
I believe the traditional goals for criminal justice are:
Rehabilitation
Punishment (/deterrence?)
Confinement
Reparation (? In cases of things like theft)
Punishment is the one I most disagree with. A large part of that is that it feels like just getting revenge. It doesn't aim to improve society in any way, it just makes us feel good to kick the bad person.
Now, I would accept that to some degree punishment can serve towards rehab - if you fine someone they're going to probably not do that again, which is why this gets put as deterrence... but I'm fairly sure that there's a huge amount of evidence that sentences have basically no deterrent effect. So in that light... why do it?
Now, if somebody seems dangerous, the life sentence serves a purpose for containment. But any lesser sentence needs to be aimed at rehab because they're going to get out and if you're just punishing them you're liable to make them worse and then why the fuck are you letting them out? That is, I don't think temporary incarceration can be justified if it's not for rehab purposes, as it seems like it clearly makes society worse off. It doesn't serve a purpose for prevention either - you're just time-shifting the next crime to the future. Do it enough and it doesn't even matter because they get replaced by people coming out (if there's rough equilibrium in percentage in jail).
1) The state shouldn't kill people, flat out. That's an ideological thing so I'm sure it won't be convincing to you.
I'm not so sure about this. The state kills people all the time, national security and foreign policy are going to pretty regularly involve someone being killed purposefully.
2) Our justice system wrongfully convicts people all the time. And wrongfully sentences people to death. And there's a major racial disparity there. Give the state a tool and you have to think about how it will function all the time, not just in any particular case.
Making policy based on extreme circumstances leads to bad things.
"Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt"?
Well, that can apply to a lot of things. Like healthcare or education. And then, it requires people to decide who deserves to have resources spent for and who doesn't. Should we write off entire wings of human society because the odds of them succeeding by themselves are slimmer? I find that to be utterly monstrous.
Cannibals and rapists are not "entire wings of human society". The more money is spent on trying to bring them back into human society (that may I remind you they purposefully distanced themselves from) the less money that is available for the rest of us.
I have a question for you, Captain Marcus: Why should we punish people?
Knowing that punishment is not a good way to change people's behaviors, what good is punishment?
So, i guess i have two questions, why should we punish people and who decides who is not worth spending resources on?
A. Punishment enacts a price from criminals for their behavior. You take something from someone else (possessions, life, choice of sexual partner) and society takes something from you. Depending on what you took the cost can be something small like a fine or a few days in jail or it can be the rest of your existence via life in prison or execution. It is separate from rehabilitation and the two can occur at the same time.
B. Society? That's kind of why we have sentencing laws, and societal representatives that come up with them.
The problem with the death penalty as a national policy is that these cases, as sensational as they are, are exceedingly rare. As much as we would like the death penalty to be reserved to the serial rapists and cannibals, that would mean there would be a lot of empty gas chambers around the country, and bureaucracy abhors a vacuum. Criminal justice institutions have a funny way of reinforcing their own existence by expanding their domain - when a state doesn't have enough Ted Bundys to keep death row busy, the criteria for qualifying for the death penalty will slowly erode until we're executing a mentally disabled dude over a murder committed when an armed robbery went wrong.
That's very true and I agree wholeheartedly. I'd love to see a system where the right to seek the death penalty is transferred over to Federal prosecutors and they'd step in in cases like this one. It shouldn't be a "states' rights" issue. There could be a single country-wide location for executions and a vastly cut-down appeals process- the death penalty is only so expensive because the cases get dragged out over decades. Yes, I know there's a racial disparity, and yes a small handful of innocent people do get caught up in it, but if you limited the death penalty to outrageous crimes like these I feel the chance of race or innocence coming into it is slim to none.
Why should society spend its limited resources on your revenge?
Why shouldn't society take revenge on behalf of the dead?
Cannibals and rapists are not "entire wings of human society". The more money is spent on trying to bring them back into human society (that may I remind you they purposefully distanced themselves from) the less money that is available for the rest of us.
Last i checked, A) The death penalty isn't just for cannibals and murderers are not all "Purposefully distnacing themselves from society".
Additionally, you have the whole thing about how if society shouldn't spend resources on people who commit murders, that sets a really dangerous precedent about who society should spend resources on. i mean, Clearly poor people won't give as much back to society than wealthy people, so clearly that means we should defund schools, right? Hence my question: Who gets to decide who Society should spend resources on?
A. Punishment enacts a price from criminals for their behavior. You take something from someone else (possessions, life, choice of sexual partner) and society takes something from you. Depending on what you took the cost can be something small like a fine or a few days in jail or it can be the rest of your existence via life in prison or execution. It is separate from rehabilitation and the two can occur at the same time.
No, Punishment is not a price criminals pay. A price implies that an exchange occurs. Punishment gets nothing out of it and, in fact, loses resources.
B. Society? That's kind of why we have sentencing laws, and societal representatives that come up with them.
But society does choose to, by and large, spend resources on people you'd write off?
Why shouldn't society take revenge on behalf of the dead?
Because revenge is not constructive. Because revenge is destructive. Because making people suffer does not make people whole. Because revenge only creates worse criminals if they get out and only causes suffering if they don't. Because it costs Society resources that could be spent on preventing crime.
Example[/url]- a Pennsylvanian woman adopted a teenage orphan together with her boyfriend, then raped and murdered her over the course of over 20 hours as part of a shared sexual fetish. I believe that what these two have done puts them beyond any conception of mercy or leniency and that they should be put to death as soon as possible.
Counterexample: Last summer a man in Michigan died after decades in prison for the rape and murder of a child. For three of those decades, his alleged victim - alive and quite insistent that while she was raped she does not believe she was murdered - fought to get him freed. Had he been in, say, Texas, he would most likely have already been executed by the time his victim found out she couldn't get a license because she's supposed to be dead, and even the vain attempt would have been moot.
What I mean to say is there are extremes on both ends, but the rules are in place all the time. The system already is designed around a default setting of "elaborate snuff fetishism," when in reality the bell curve peaks somewhere between "negligence" and "desperation."
Hevach on
+8
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Firstly, I would note that Captain Marcus has about a million people directly responding to him so I shall try and keep my own comments addressed to him brief. There's nothing inherent in the philosophy of conservatism that makes a support for the death penalty a natural consequence. It is merely a historically contingent fact brought about by how the American culture wars shake out that it is so associated.
My more general observation is that determinism and everything we know about the science of the brain, and everything we expect to discover and understand in the future makes the concept of punishment seem increasingly crazy and pointless.
Consider the unfortunate case of Charles Whitman, who committed the following crimes: he murdered his family before heading to the university of Texas and shooting dozens of people, ultimately killing 17 before being killed by police. A simple case of a man getting his just desserts? Probably not, as it turns out. He left a diary detailing changes he felt in himself and urged that his body be donated to science to discover what was wrong with him and drove him to kill, he had also sought medical advice on his own violent urges and hostility. It turns out he had a brain tumour and it seems likely that this completely altered his ability to control himself as well as his decision making - likely pressing against his amygdula amongst other things.
As a general intuition almost everyone finds the tumour to be a somewhat exculpatory fact - we acknowledge that on some level Whitman's actions were simply a matter of bad luck, of things outside of his control. That if it had have been possible to capture him and remove his tumour we'd be left with something of a different person, if we intervened beforehand he certainly wouldn't have been a bad person. But once this becomes a matter of medical intervention would it even make sense to incarcerate him, let alone put him to death? I say "no"!
But that's all merely a preamble to the real kicker - we are all Charles Whitman - our choices are merely the product of physiological processes, and our history and interaction with the environment - all of which is at base chemical processes. That one person reacts with anger at a perceived slight while the other is able to maintain their composure or react with violence while the other walks away is merely a product of circumstance - how their brain is wired is a consequence of genetics and the environments in which they grew up, their level of patience and willpower is a product of how much sleep they got last night in addition to the aforementioned, and so on, and so forth.
The alternative illustration is that of an infinite regress - we ask why did someone choose X and not Y? The answer "because they chose to choose X" is immediately apparent as not satisfactory - the infinite regress is obvious, the lack of explanatory power is clear. Fundamentally, every aspect of our personality and the choices we make are the product of luck for good or ill.
So, in the future medicine has advanced and we can now scan a person's brain, we can identify various forms of neuropathology and anti-social traits, we have a variety of simple treatments that will rewire all manner of issues. We discover a psychopath, having killed 10 people we are faced with the choice - do we punish the psychopath or treat the condition? In a fit of emotion a wife stabs her husband do we punish her or treat the condition of "reacts to emotion with violence"?
As a conservative I'm naturally in favor of the "punishment" side of our legal system. Rehabilitation is great and something that America greatly needs to improve upon but I think that some people shouldn't be offered that chance (i.e., ones that have committed crimes so inhumane/depraved as to warrant the death penalty).
Example- a Pennsylvanian woman adopted a teenage orphan together with her boyfriend, then raped and murdered her over the course of over 20 hours as part of a shared sexual fetish. I believe that what these two have done puts them beyond any conception of mercy or leniency and that they should be put to death as soon as possible.
Most of you here would probably disagree. So I ask you, how can you rehabilitate monsters like these? Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt?
Perhaps most importantly, why should we let those who kill children live? This also applies to other particularly evil crimes- slavery, serial rape, serial murder, cannibalism, etc.
Punishment is also achieved by systems that do not institutionalize violence or systematic death. We tend to champion physical violence as the ultimate punishment because of the immediacy of it & catharsis it releases in the moment... but a beating is finite and a killing is swift. Almost certainly, the worst torment we can put someone in is not punching them in the face or filling their veins with lethal poison - it is isolating them from contact with other people (and American justice systems seem to understand this too, reserving for their traitors the sentencing of solitary confinement).
An egalitarian Norwegian prison is still punishing prisoners in a way that no torture device will ever be able to achieve by separating them from their normal social contacts & family. I mean, think about it: if I offered you a choice of either having your legs broken tomorrow or being hauled-off to a remote home where you'd have no contact or extremely limited contact with your friends or family for 5-ish years or so, which would you choose?
As to why we should 'let those who kill children live': the state shouldn't be involved in the business of 'allowing' specific cohorts to live or die. The state's power should not be so pervasive that it has a trap door under everyone's feet and one needs to state their case for why said trap door shouldn't be opened on a whim.
Frodo: It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill him when he had the chance.
Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
if the only people who ever get the death penalty are the tiny minority of criminals who have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, done inconceivably vile things, then why even bother with it
i don't object to it but i also don't see the point. the number of people who genuinely ought to be killed is so small that having a whole system in place to kill them seems pointless. just put them in jail forever, who gives a shit
if the only people who ever get the death penalty are the tiny minority of criminals who have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, done inconceivably vile things, then why even bother with it
i don't object to it but i also don't see the point. the number of people who genuinely ought to be killed is so small that having a whole system in place to kill them seems pointless. just put them in jail forever, who gives a shit
Well, they're still human beings. i don't believe there's any law that says "if you kill a child, you are no longer a human being". i don't believe that would be acceptable, either. Even if someone does something you find "inconceivably vile", they're still human beings with a life, family, friends, etc. Remember that if you put someone in jail, their entire family is affected by it. So i guess I kinda do give a shit?
So yeah, i do think that putting someone in jail forever is ok in cases where the person simply cannot be rehabilitated, but not as punishment. Not in solitary, either.
I feel that punishment for punishment's sake has no place in a modern penal system.
The terms of rehabilitation while being cut off from society are punishment enough.
It's weird to call out serial killers and cannibals as if the latter crime could exist in the absence of the former and still be equally abhorrent. If a cannibal manages to live out their diet plan without becoming a murderer (or serial amputator?); I don't really have a problem with it.
It's not the 'improper disposal of human remains' that is the problem in that equation.
Cannibals and rapists are not "entire wings of human society". The more money is spent on trying to bring them back into human society (that may I remind you they purposefully distanced themselves from) the less money that is available for the rest of us.
Cannibals and rapists are not the only people being accused of and sentenced for crimes. Our government is not perfect and I'm not a fan of giving it the power to only hurt people and not help.
As far as money, our focus on punishing rather than rehabilitation is more expensive. We have a massive prison population because of a desire to be "tough" on crime. One that only increases as the state fails to rehabilitate people and many end up repeating their crimes.
If your primary concerns really are for there to be fewer criminals and to spend less money on them, rehabilitation is the way to go. A fixation on punishment only makes both problems worse.
Speaking of the death penalty, Dylan Roof was sentenced to death today. Which is what he wanted, so everybody's happy I guess.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
It's weird to call out serial killers and cannibals as if the latter crime could exist in the absence of the former and still be equally abhorrent. If a cannibal manages to live out their diet plan without becoming a murderer (or serial amputator?); I don't really have a problem with it.
It's not the 'improper disposal of human remains' that is the problem in that equation.
/aside
I smell a business opportunity: a social network that connects cannibals up with body integrity identity disorder sufferers.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Speaking of the death penalty, Dylan Roof was sentenced to death today. Which is what he wanted, so everybody's happy I guess.
Great. We're going to happily martyr him.
To what, the ten or so members of the KKK that aren't already federal informants? The handful of Aryan Brotherhood members there for the ideology instead of the smuggled meth? There isn't some great mass of latent white culture warriors waiting for a man to lead them, and even if there was, this guy isn't it.
Speaking of the death penalty, Dylan Roof was sentenced to death today. Which is what he wanted, so everybody's happy I guess.
Great. We're going to happily martyr him.
To what, the ten or so members of the KKK that aren't already federal informants? The handful of Aryan Brotherhood members there for the ideology instead of the smuggled meth? There isn't some great mass of latent white culture warriors waiting for a man to lead them, and even if there was, this guy isn't it.
The man to lead them takes residence in the White House in 9 days. White supremacy is back in the mainstream.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
Speaking of the death penalty, Dylan Roof was sentenced to death today. Which is what he wanted, so everybody's happy I guess.
Great. We're going to happily martyr him.
To what, the ten or so members of the KKK that aren't already federal informants? The handful of Aryan Brotherhood members there for the ideology instead of the smuggled meth? There isn't some great mass of latent white culture warriors waiting for a man to lead them, and even if there was, this guy isn't it.
The man to lead them takes residence in the White House in 9 days. White supremacy is back in the mainstream.
I love how this kills all discussion because we all know how it ends in here.
Off of the circlejerk and back to the subject at hand, I'd say the Death Penalty is more a holdover from times when incarceration was not as feasible and when justice had a distinctly more hammurabic bent. It served to provide an equal response for the crime committed, and also demonstrated the power of the state: you break the rules of the society we run, and you die (usually in a horrible fashion in the public square for everyone to observe the event and internalize the lesson to Not Break That Same Rule). These days we have more alternatives to permanently remove someone from society, but the 'teach others who may commit the same crime an object lesson of why not to do so' aspect still lingers in our culture as the correct thing to do. To a certain degree I don't disagree that some variant of this 'public lesson' might be useful, but I don't know how useful it is really compared to the alternative.
In a modern judicial system, there may be less resources spent letting monsters live out their lives in prison vs expensive death sentence appeals.
There's also the matter of false convictions. Many "guilty" men got let out of prison when DNA evidence was developed and allowed them to prove their innocence. If they'd been killed for their monstrous crimes (as was supposed) the poshumous vindication would not have been much comfort.
In a modern judicial system, there may be less resources spent letting monsters live out their lives in prison vs expensive death sentence appeals.
There's also the matter of false convictions. Many "guilty" men got let out of prison when DNA evidence was developed and allowed them to prove their innocence. If they'd been killed for their monstrous crimes (as was supposed) the poshumous vindication would not have been much comfort.
Certainly, and I'd say if we're going to remove the death penalty we should make some serious changes to the review system for people sentenced to life in prison for much the same reason. As an aside, I'm now quite curious about psychology regarding third parties observing a punishment rather than just reading or hearing about it, or simply seeing its aftermath. Does anyone happen to know of a study off the top of their head on this topic?
The death penalty in western civilizations originally was about State sanctioned terror against it's own people because the State's power and authority came from God, not the will of the people. It was a brutal and effective method to keep the general population cowed.
Today the modern Nation-State doesn't need to keep it's citizens in a constant state of fear of the State to maintain it's power, so the only reason to keep the death penalty is to act as a deterrence to not commit specific crimes. However, it's pretty widely understood that punishment, no matter how swift or brutal it is, doesn't stop someone from committing a crime if they were already inclined to do so. The only thing that can really prevent someone from committing a crime is to increase the odds they will be caught. "Because I'd get caught" is the only thing that truly stops people from committing a crime, and yet even if it's a 100% guarantee that they'd be caught it still doesn't stop people from deluding themselves into believing they wouldn't be caught. If you've ever hung around children, aka miniature psychopaths, this is plainly evident.
This also doesn't even touch the "crimes of passion" situation where someone just snaps and loses their ability to control their actions, such as a husband/wife walking in on their spouse being intimate with someone else. If anyone thinks more punishment or the guarantee of being caught would stop those crimes, then I've got a couple bridges in NYC to sell ya.
Posts
2) Our justice system wrongfully convicts people all the time. And wrongfully sentences people to death. And there's a major racial disparity there. Give the state a tool and you have to think about how it will function all the time, not just in any particular case.
Making policy based on extreme circumstances leads to bad things.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Because it is more expensive.
Why should society spend it's limited resources on your revenge?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost
Another thing to keep in mind is the huge subjective factor in death penalty/ life without parole cases that allow racial/class/gender bias to make decisions unjust.
Bolded what i find most egregious.
"Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt"?
Well, that can apply to a lot of things. Like healthcare or education. And then, it requires people to decide who deserves to have resources spent for and who doesn't. Should we write off entire wings of human society because the odds of them succeeding by themselves are slimmer? I find that to be utterly monstrous.
I have a question for you, @Captain Marcus: Why should we punish people?
Knowing that punishment is not a good way to change people's behaviors, what good is punishment?
So, i guess i have two questions, why should we punish people and who decides who is not worth spending resources on?
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I don't shed any tears when somebody who is legitimately a monster is put down. I don't oppose the death penalty in principle.
The problem with the death penalty as a national policy is that these cases, as sensational as they are, are exceedingly rare. As much as we would like the death penalty to be reserved to the serial rapists and cannibals, that would mean there would be a lot of empty gas chambers around the country, and bureaucracy abhors a vacuum. Criminal justice institutions have a funny way of reinforcing their own existence by expanding their domain - when a state doesn't have enough Ted Bundys to keep death row busy, the criteria for qualifying for the death penalty will slowly erode until we're executing a mentally disabled dude over a murder committed when an armed robbery went wrong.
We've shown ourselves to be incapable of implementing the death penalty fairly, consistently, with appropriate restraint. I not sure if we ever will be.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This argument has a dark side to it.
We spend more money on the death penalty because we spend more resources on confirming the guilt of those on death row. Consequently, death row inmates have a much higher exoneration rate than life sentence inmates.
IMO, the problem isn't that we spend too much money on the death penalty, but too little on everybody else. Our real exoneration rate is 1.6%, and one recent-ish study suggests that might be way too low.
Meanwhile, even though we have over 2 million people in jail and prison right now, fewer than 2,000 felony convictions have been exonerated since 1989.
This suggests we have a lot of people serving life sentences who are innocent. while this is not as horrible as a death sentence, it's still pretty damn horrible.
This leads to a strange paradoxical possibility: if we were to abolish the death penalty, without redistributing the resources spent on death penalty appeals to other felony appeals, the number of innocent people who die while incarcerated is likely to go up. Instead of being put to death, they simply sit in prison for years until they die of natural causes, institutional infections, or violence.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Not just that but also separate facilities and increased staffing since death row prisoners don't have any real reason to follow the rules.
Cannibals and rapists are not "entire wings of human society". The more money is spent on trying to bring them back into human society (that may I remind you they purposefully distanced themselves from) the less money that is available for the rest of us.
A. Punishment enacts a price from criminals for their behavior. You take something from someone else (possessions, life, choice of sexual partner) and society takes something from you. Depending on what you took the cost can be something small like a fine or a few days in jail or it can be the rest of your existence via life in prison or execution. It is separate from rehabilitation and the two can occur at the same time.
B. Society? That's kind of why we have sentencing laws, and societal representatives that come up with them.
That's very true and I agree wholeheartedly. I'd love to see a system where the right to seek the death penalty is transferred over to Federal prosecutors and they'd step in in cases like this one. It shouldn't be a "states' rights" issue. There could be a single country-wide location for executions and a vastly cut-down appeals process- the death penalty is only so expensive because the cases get dragged out over decades. Yes, I know there's a racial disparity, and yes a small handful of innocent people do get caught up in it, but if you limited the death penalty to outrageous crimes like these I feel the chance of race or innocence coming into it is slim to none.
Why shouldn't society take revenge on behalf of the dead?
Rehabilitation
Punishment (/deterrence?)
Confinement
Reparation (? In cases of things like theft)
Punishment is the one I most disagree with. A large part of that is that it feels like just getting revenge. It doesn't aim to improve society in any way, it just makes us feel good to kick the bad person.
Now, I would accept that to some degree punishment can serve towards rehab - if you fine someone they're going to probably not do that again, which is why this gets put as deterrence... but I'm fairly sure that there's a huge amount of evidence that sentences have basically no deterrent effect. So in that light... why do it?
Now, if somebody seems dangerous, the life sentence serves a purpose for containment. But any lesser sentence needs to be aimed at rehab because they're going to get out and if you're just punishing them you're liable to make them worse and then why the fuck are you letting them out? That is, I don't think temporary incarceration can be justified if it's not for rehab purposes, as it seems like it clearly makes society worse off. It doesn't serve a purpose for prevention either - you're just time-shifting the next crime to the future. Do it enough and it doesn't even matter because they get replaced by people coming out (if there's rough equilibrium in percentage in jail).
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I'm not so sure about this. The state kills people all the time, national security and foreign policy are going to pretty regularly involve someone being killed purposefully.
Certainly agree without caveat.
Cannibals and rapists are not "entire wings of human society". The more money is spent on trying to bring them back into human society (that may I remind you they purposefully distanced themselves from) the less money that is available for the rest of us.
Last i checked, A) The death penalty isn't just for cannibals and murderers are not all "Purposefully distnacing themselves from society".
Additionally, you have the whole thing about how if society shouldn't spend resources on people who commit murders, that sets a really dangerous precedent about who society should spend resources on. i mean, Clearly poor people won't give as much back to society than wealthy people, so clearly that means we should defund schools, right? Hence my question: Who gets to decide who Society should spend resources on?
A. Punishment enacts a price from criminals for their behavior. You take something from someone else (possessions, life, choice of sexual partner) and society takes something from you. Depending on what you took the cost can be something small like a fine or a few days in jail or it can be the rest of your existence via life in prison or execution. It is separate from rehabilitation and the two can occur at the same time.
No, Punishment is not a price criminals pay. A price implies that an exchange occurs. Punishment gets nothing out of it and, in fact, loses resources.
B. Society? That's kind of why we have sentencing laws, and societal representatives that come up with them.
But society does choose to, by and large, spend resources on people you'd write off?
Why shouldn't society take revenge on behalf of the dead?
Because revenge is not constructive. Because revenge is destructive. Because making people suffer does not make people whole. Because revenge only creates worse criminals if they get out and only causes suffering if they don't. Because it costs Society resources that could be spent on preventing crime.
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They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Counterexample: Last summer a man in Michigan died after decades in prison for the rape and murder of a child. For three of those decades, his alleged victim - alive and quite insistent that while she was raped she does not believe she was murdered - fought to get him freed. Had he been in, say, Texas, he would most likely have already been executed by the time his victim found out she couldn't get a license because she's supposed to be dead, and even the vain attempt would have been moot.
What I mean to say is there are extremes on both ends, but the rules are in place all the time. The system already is designed around a default setting of "elaborate snuff fetishism," when in reality the bell curve peaks somewhere between "negligence" and "desperation."
My more general observation is that determinism and everything we know about the science of the brain, and everything we expect to discover and understand in the future makes the concept of punishment seem increasingly crazy and pointless.
Consider the unfortunate case of Charles Whitman, who committed the following crimes: he murdered his family before heading to the university of Texas and shooting dozens of people, ultimately killing 17 before being killed by police. A simple case of a man getting his just desserts? Probably not, as it turns out. He left a diary detailing changes he felt in himself and urged that his body be donated to science to discover what was wrong with him and drove him to kill, he had also sought medical advice on his own violent urges and hostility. It turns out he had a brain tumour and it seems likely that this completely altered his ability to control himself as well as his decision making - likely pressing against his amygdula amongst other things.
As a general intuition almost everyone finds the tumour to be a somewhat exculpatory fact - we acknowledge that on some level Whitman's actions were simply a matter of bad luck, of things outside of his control. That if it had have been possible to capture him and remove his tumour we'd be left with something of a different person, if we intervened beforehand he certainly wouldn't have been a bad person. But once this becomes a matter of medical intervention would it even make sense to incarcerate him, let alone put him to death? I say "no"!
But that's all merely a preamble to the real kicker - we are all Charles Whitman - our choices are merely the product of physiological processes, and our history and interaction with the environment - all of which is at base chemical processes. That one person reacts with anger at a perceived slight while the other is able to maintain their composure or react with violence while the other walks away is merely a product of circumstance - how their brain is wired is a consequence of genetics and the environments in which they grew up, their level of patience and willpower is a product of how much sleep they got last night in addition to the aforementioned, and so on, and so forth.
The alternative illustration is that of an infinite regress - we ask why did someone choose X and not Y? The answer "because they chose to choose X" is immediately apparent as not satisfactory - the infinite regress is obvious, the lack of explanatory power is clear. Fundamentally, every aspect of our personality and the choices we make are the product of luck for good or ill.
So, in the future medicine has advanced and we can now scan a person's brain, we can identify various forms of neuropathology and anti-social traits, we have a variety of simple treatments that will rewire all manner of issues. We discover a psychopath, having killed 10 people we are faced with the choice - do we punish the psychopath or treat the condition? In a fit of emotion a wife stabs her husband do we punish her or treat the condition of "reacts to emotion with violence"?
Punishment is also achieved by systems that do not institutionalize violence or systematic death. We tend to champion physical violence as the ultimate punishment because of the immediacy of it & catharsis it releases in the moment... but a beating is finite and a killing is swift. Almost certainly, the worst torment we can put someone in is not punching them in the face or filling their veins with lethal poison - it is isolating them from contact with other people (and American justice systems seem to understand this too, reserving for their traitors the sentencing of solitary confinement).
An egalitarian Norwegian prison is still punishing prisoners in a way that no torture device will ever be able to achieve by separating them from their normal social contacts & family. I mean, think about it: if I offered you a choice of either having your legs broken tomorrow or being hauled-off to a remote home where you'd have no contact or extremely limited contact with your friends or family for 5-ish years or so, which would you choose?
As to why we should 'let those who kill children live': the state shouldn't be involved in the business of 'allowing' specific cohorts to live or die. The state's power should not be so pervasive that it has a trap door under everyone's feet and one needs to state their case for why said trap door shouldn't be opened on a whim.
i don't object to it but i also don't see the point. the number of people who genuinely ought to be killed is so small that having a whole system in place to kill them seems pointless. just put them in jail forever, who gives a shit
Well, they're still human beings. i don't believe there's any law that says "if you kill a child, you are no longer a human being". i don't believe that would be acceptable, either. Even if someone does something you find "inconceivably vile", they're still human beings with a life, family, friends, etc. Remember that if you put someone in jail, their entire family is affected by it. So i guess I kinda do give a shit?
So yeah, i do think that putting someone in jail forever is ok in cases where the person simply cannot be rehabilitated, but not as punishment. Not in solitary, either.
I feel that punishment for punishment's sake has no place in a modern penal system.
The terms of rehabilitation while being cut off from society are punishment enough.
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It's not the 'improper disposal of human remains' that is the problem in that equation.
/aside
Cannibals and rapists are not the only people being accused of and sentenced for crimes. Our government is not perfect and I'm not a fan of giving it the power to only hurt people and not help.
As far as money, our focus on punishing rather than rehabilitation is more expensive. We have a massive prison population because of a desire to be "tough" on crime. One that only increases as the state fails to rehabilitate people and many end up repeating their crimes.
If your primary concerns really are for there to be fewer criminals and to spend less money on them, rehabilitation is the way to go. A fixation on punishment only makes both problems worse.
Great. We're going to happily martyr him.
I smell a business opportunity: a social network that connects cannibals up with body integrity identity disorder sufferers.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
To what, the ten or so members of the KKK that aren't already federal informants? The handful of Aryan Brotherhood members there for the ideology instead of the smuggled meth? There isn't some great mass of latent white culture warriors waiting for a man to lead them, and even if there was, this guy isn't it.
The man to lead them takes residence in the White House in 9 days. White supremacy is back in the mainstream.
I love how this kills all discussion because we all know how it ends in here.
Off of the circlejerk and back to the subject at hand, I'd say the Death Penalty is more a holdover from times when incarceration was not as feasible and when justice had a distinctly more hammurabic bent. It served to provide an equal response for the crime committed, and also demonstrated the power of the state: you break the rules of the society we run, and you die (usually in a horrible fashion in the public square for everyone to observe the event and internalize the lesson to Not Break That Same Rule). These days we have more alternatives to permanently remove someone from society, but the 'teach others who may commit the same crime an object lesson of why not to do so' aspect still lingers in our culture as the correct thing to do. To a certain degree I don't disagree that some variant of this 'public lesson' might be useful, but I don't know how useful it is really compared to the alternative.
There's also the matter of false convictions. Many "guilty" men got let out of prison when DNA evidence was developed and allowed them to prove their innocence. If they'd been killed for their monstrous crimes (as was supposed) the poshumous vindication would not have been much comfort.
Certainly, and I'd say if we're going to remove the death penalty we should make some serious changes to the review system for people sentenced to life in prison for much the same reason. As an aside, I'm now quite curious about psychology regarding third parties observing a punishment rather than just reading or hearing about it, or simply seeing its aftermath. Does anyone happen to know of a study off the top of their head on this topic?
Today the modern Nation-State doesn't need to keep it's citizens in a constant state of fear of the State to maintain it's power, so the only reason to keep the death penalty is to act as a deterrence to not commit specific crimes. However, it's pretty widely understood that punishment, no matter how swift or brutal it is, doesn't stop someone from committing a crime if they were already inclined to do so. The only thing that can really prevent someone from committing a crime is to increase the odds they will be caught. "Because I'd get caught" is the only thing that truly stops people from committing a crime, and yet even if it's a 100% guarantee that they'd be caught it still doesn't stop people from deluding themselves into believing they wouldn't be caught. If you've ever hung around children, aka miniature psychopaths, this is plainly evident.
This also doesn't even touch the "crimes of passion" situation where someone just snaps and loses their ability to control their actions, such as a husband/wife walking in on their spouse being intimate with someone else. If anyone thinks more punishment or the guarantee of being caught would stop those crimes, then I've got a couple bridges in NYC to sell ya.