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chaosmage  11mo ago (text post)   2196 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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5000 dollars to a person of your choice

This will rapidly result in effectively paying the meanest prisoner $5000 a head to bring the life of weak prisoners to an end and making it look like suicide. It's a death penalty by proxy with cash rewards for the most ruthless serial murderer. You could try and close that loophole but they'll remain incentivised to the tune of $5000 to find new exploits, and each $5000 will give them additional capacity to find them. It's a persecution racket.

if you want prisoners to die you should assume the responsibility for killing them.

if you want prisoners to die you should assume the responsibility for killing them.

Exactly. I don't support the death penalty, but if we want dead criminals, let's man the fuck up and hire the public executioner and face up to what we're doing, rather than "it was up to Joe the Joker if he killed himself or not, our hands are clean".

Reminds me of Kevin Williamson's support for hanging (though he opposes the death penalty). If we want the state to have the power of execution, we should have to confront the consequences. None of this pseudo medicalized stuff. Firing squad or hanging.

I agree. I always thought we should use the firing squad. If we are going to execute people we need to be extremely clear that this is what we are doing: killing a human being. Firing squad seems more difficult to screw up.

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