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Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
I reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.
Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.
The kind of labor that can be efficiently done by slaves is mostly done even more efficiently by machines these days, and prison guards cost a lot more than just hiring society's existing pool of the poorest(voluntarily out of the probation office if need be). Forced labor outside of the third world is mostly sex work these days and that's for a reason which doesn't have much to do with human kindness.
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The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.
Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.
The enslaved soldiers definitely would have still been out-group after being enslaved, and if anything more prone to massive violence. You're correct that executions were also common, but I don't think either of us have the data to talk about "standard practice" in this case. And yet, an argument that says, "hard labor cannot be more efficient than execution" required a preponderance of the evidence, while my position (that hard labor can be made to be more efficient) requires only a collection of positive examples, regardless of how representative they are of average behavior.
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Forced labour probably doesn't pay for itself if you have to pay the man with the whip a first-world middle-class salary. The gap in productivity between a slave and a free worker has grown a lot larger a society has got more productive.
The cost to feed/house/guard a prisoner in the US is significantly higher than the annual earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker, which is roughly the value you can extract from a forced worker (and more than you can get competing with the 3rd worlders on MTurk). The Nazi forced labour systems (the concentration camps that were not extermination camps, the Jewish ghettos, the forced labour of kidnapped French boys in Germany) were profitable, but the workers were not getting enough food for long-term survival, and the guards were cheap conscripts.
I'm almost absolutely positive it could. The carceral system-- and in particular the prison labor system-- is inefficient because it has misaligned incentives at every level due to a complete lack of consensus about its actual goals plus institutional inertia from times with totally different values. If we're talking about making dramatic reforms anyways (which would be required to significantly streamline the process of executing criminals) then we could orient things towards actually making the existence of prisoners net remunerative for society.
Uh, imprisonment in the US is ridiculously expensive, and that's mostly security costs which don't exactly get easier if the prisoners are doing hard labor.
Our justice system is expensive because it's poorly designed. Or rather, because it wasn't designed-- because it's just a long pile-up of compromises with no guiding ethos. And yet, despite that, if we assume we're not going to redesign it, then imprisonment is still cheaper than the death penalty. If we assume we are going to redesign it, then why no redesign it so that criminals directly repay their contributions to society?
People demand that prisons be punitive while at the same time squeamish about the exact nature of punishment. Of course that leads to poor optimization for economic efficiency. We could get a lot more efficient use out of prisoners if we were a lot more judicious about exactly which rights we chose to violate, while at the same time not losing our heads if the same measures end up making prisoners happy. For example, encouraging moderate cocaine use but then predicating their supply on being productive and compliant.
(I'm not saying that specific intervention would solve our problem, just using it as an example of the sort of measure no one is even willing to consider.)
I'm also addressing your comment here:
... with the above. Historically, slaves did plenty of complicated, specialized work that required a surprisingly high level of education. In rome,
That in the modern day compelled labour is typically done by people with only the desire for and ability to compel uncomplicated work doesn't mean we'd have to stick to that paradigm. We imprison plenty of lawyers, hedge fund managers, accountants, scientists, etcetera. It shouldn't be impossible to convince them to do work that's on net beneficial to society even if we have to pay them with cash or reductions to their sentences.
No we don’t. Rome captured some scribes as slaves, it’s pretty rare that a person commits a worthy-of-imprisonment crime while even able to work a factory job, let alone something high paying.
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Indeed.
So these prisoners toiling under the lash had better all be full time employed professional workers for the labor camp to break even.
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I guess the question is do you need the work to be economically viable? Maybe if prisoners were forced to do non pecuniary very hard work for 12 hours a day prison would be a much worse place to be and prison might be easier to manage (since the inmates would be exhausted).
This was tried in various forms in England in the 19th century after the Victorian Gold Rush attracted enough free settlers to Australia that convicts were no longer welcome there. (The legal term was "imprisonment with hard labour"). It failed because in order to be effectively punitive for people from the kind of rough background that produces criminals, hard labour needed to be hard enough to kill a significant fraction of the people assigned it.
The Victorians were perfectly comfortable hanging criminals who committed capital offences, and there was a lot of capital offences. So working criminals to death for less-than-capital offences was ultimately rejected as cruel.
Ok, but the American underclass isn't used to doing backbreaking labor. Bosses prefer Guatemalans for a reason.
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The gulags had lots of disciplinary problems despite prisoners being literally worked to death on a regular basis.
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