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chaosmage  11mo ago (text post)   2204 thread views

Should lifetime prisoners be incentivized to kill themselves?

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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The moral basis for protecting life is surely more related to the ... continuance of that life and the person's experiences and actions, than the person's lack of consent to dying? Children drowning wouldn't be good if you could convince the kids it was a good thing.

So, if killing prisoners is good, why get their consent? Just increase the scope of the death penalty. The much-mentioned expense of the death penalty is entirely procedural. And if it's bad, then why would their consent matter?

Anyway, the cost, in money, of lifetime imprisonment isn't that much on a societal scale, like, compared to welfare or healthcare. A competent government should probably address it, but it's not particularly pressing.

The moral basis for protecting life is surely more related to the ... continuance of that life and the person's experiences and actions, than the person's lack of consent to dying?

Preference utilitarianism and to some extent liberalism disagree with this.

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