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The problem with discussions like this is always the same thing, we can't decide on what exactly punishment (and jailing someone in particular) is meant to be for. Is it revenge? Deterrence? Rehabilitation? Is it just keeping known dangerous elements locked up? It's all of those to some degree, but also kinda none of them either.
Like imagine for instance a virus is created that causes .5% of the population with a rare biomarker to go and kill the nearest person. They can't control themselves and once they kill they go back to normal and build up an immunity so they can't be infected again with it. These are known and proven results, no amount of willpower can resist it and no one with the killing virus has ever done it a second time. Should we still punish them? I think there's a fair argument towards no, that they are perfectly fine and good people who had their sense of reason momentarily snatched away from them.
Ok now imagine it's say schizophrenia, extreme enough that they engage in violence and murder but we invent a long term cure and 95% of these violent schizophrenics are no longer violent and won't reoffend, should we let them out of jail early since the problem is solved? Are they not too fine and good people who had their sense of reason snatched away, and now restored?
Or what if we believe there's a high chance that a mentally ill killer won't reoffend again if we put them in a nursing home and just have them watched all day? What if the postpartum depression mother, overwhelmed by uncontrollable thoughts and feelings, won't ever hurt anyone else again and with some careful watching of any future pregnancies won't be able to reoffend? Should we punish those people still if the problem is solved?
Of course the real world isn't so clean and simple as thought experiments and erring on the side of caution is what I'd do for real world scenarios, but there's definitely a lot of fair discussion to be had.
There's a lot I wonder here.
In the Catholic framework and the theological traditions that believe in sacramental graces, the state can grant a mercy to the condemned-to-death by allowing them last rites and Christian burial. But there is mercy in life in prison rather than condemning to death, especially in traditions that don't believe in sacramental graces but do believe in prevenient grace, such that a murderer might with time gain repentance.
I wonder if this latter, in part, contributed to what became the idea of rehabilitation. That as we moved into a materialistic framework the idea of mercy was retained and repentance became the generic idea of a person being rehabilitated. I have a problem with this as a critique for the materialist framework: if murder dispatches a mind to oblivion, execution would surely become the only just punishment, as it is the only punishment that approaches proportionality, except perhaps for letting the murderer live but only to put them through physical torture until they die.
I want to stay generally abstract but there is a common response, from those who advocate for leniency-based reforms around incarceration, of questioning the incentives. The death penalty doesn't work because people still murder. Maybe, it wouldn't be unfair for a person to say there were many more executions in the past and there was still crime, what's it doing? But this all supposes we punish crime as a disincentive to crime, but that framework, consequentialism, looks out the corner of its eyes at countries like El Salvador, or another example with Indonesia. Indonesia has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, and not to put too much stock in genetics, but Indonesia is not high on the IQ charts. They just very aggressively prosecute crime, as El Salvador now does, to great effect.
A last note on this point: I also wonder if it's not so much that the death penalty doesn't work, it's that there are many, many individuals in the US who could have been justifiably locked away for life long before they ever murdered. Around 50% of US inmates have 10 previous arrests. It's difficult not to suspect people who say policing and incarceration don't work when some of those people dedicate their lives to making it harder to police and incarcerate.
But this still looks at the problem by assuming a given framework. I don't believe in punishment to stop other people from being criminals, I believe in punishment because crimes, evils, create disorder, the literal lived disorder but also and, for me the greater, gestalt moral disorder, and disorder must be matched with order. If only one person ever murdered and we knew no one else would again, we could still punish that murderer even if it were an objective certainty no disincentive to future crime would be produced. We can put a murderer in prison for the rest of their life because what they have done, in and of itself, justifies that treatment. I don't believe we have to caveat it as the secondary to the primary purpose of rehabilitation. We don't owe it to criminals to see to their rehabilitation.
To this, the examples given suppose the rehabilitatory or incentive frameworks. If we put the murder-virus person in prison, they're already technically rehabilitated, and you can't disincentive a virus that overrides reason. Same for the schizophrenic, if they're rehabilitated, why keep them locked up? Within these frameworks these are good hypotheticals, especially since these frameworks are how the West now largely approaches crime.
But I still don't buy the frameworks. If a person inexcusably takes life, that itself, for no other considerations, is sufficient grounds to lock that person in a box until they die. If they were in a psychotic state, we can put them in a different, softer box, that they will nonetheless remain in until they die. If they wouldn't again, I would say that doesn't matter, because my framework isn't that we lock them up to stop them from committing more crime, it's that what they've done is enough to lock them away forever. If it doesn't stop others from doing it, that also doesn't matter, because we can put those people in the box, too.
To branch to something very specific: this is one area where I'm extremely optimistic about coming automation. Robot guards and human-simulacra orderlies for lifelong psychiatric institutions will do a lot for assuaging fair concerns at institutional abuse. Robot guards can't be killed or themselves be complicit in crime such as smuggling in drugs; a simulacra orderly won't torment or rape the persons under their care. These alone won't necessarily perfect prisons and psychiatric institutions, but solving the problem of manpower could allow these institutions to be run in new and much better ways.
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Prison has always been a bad solution. Per a comedian on a recent Kill Tony, 1/3 of the people in prison should really be in a mental hospital, 1/3 should be in drug rehab, and 1/3 should be taken out back and shot because they are irredeemable.
Unfortunately, our system of justice has to be 'blind', because society is too large and varied for subjective judgements about people. We can't look at a whole person, their life in the community, their past and future, and determine how best they should be dealt with to make them a useful part of society (even if judges do have some leeway on this). We have to look at the specific crime or law they've broken, and decide how to punish them for that. We have created a system that is as 'fair' as we can make it, even if the end result is a disaster for the individuals in it. In other words, our modern justice system is fundamentally bureaucratic over and above useful or even just.
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