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.
We went through an era where a number of convictions made under old forensic regimes got overturned by DNA evidence which reduced a lot of people's faith in the trial system. You might say if person did x they should die, but I'm only 95% certain they did x, so we'll confine them but not kill them on the off chance evidence emerges to vindicate them. Maybe then you give the prisoners who have no hope of such evidence emerging the option to kill themselves.
Though it's hard to ignore the perverse incentives that the worse you make prisons the more people will kill themselves and then you'll save money so it's a bad idea overall.
Do you think that it's bad that with the death penalty, you'll kill any innocent people, or too many innocent people?
All death penalty opponents I meet answer "any at all". But if that's your reasoning you shouldn't even be imprisoning them for life. You'll still get cases where someone dies in jail before there's evidence that proves them innocent. You have a longer time period before they die of old age in jail rather than before they're executed, so it's more likely that they'll be proven innocent, but it's still not guaranteed, so if your objection is that we permanently punish innocent people at all, life imprisonment is not acceptable either.
Actually, by this reasoning you shouldn't be imprisoning them for any length of time which you can't or won't compensate them for by money. You can argue how long that is; I'd say anything more than a week is, unless compensation is drastically higher than minimum wage.
Otherwise, there's an acceptable level of innocent people executed, the same way that there's an acceptable level of innocent people killed by prisoners whom we release too early. (Also, many "innocent" people still participated in the crime, just in ways which only allow lesser punishments.)
I'm not an anti-death penalty activist and I think there is some acceptable number of innocents killed by the state. I don't really believe that vengeance has any value beyond deterrence. If we end up in AI utopia with limitless resources then I wouldn't want to give anyone the death penalty, but in the present the state needs to balance deterrence, cost, and accuracy/fairness.
I don't think your conflation of death with life imprisonment as things the state should never do on the off chance it does it to an innocent makes much sense. You can say that some harm to innocents in order to confine violent criminals is okay but once they are already confined killing them has minimal benefit and raises the possibility of such immense harm to an innocent that it's not worth it.
Let's say that we develop a technology that lets people experience not just death but a virtual lifetime of torment in hell before their execution. Maybe this has an additional deterrent effect, and so it's worth consigning some innocents to VR hell. But we keep cranking this up and up, it's not just one life time it's 10 lifetimes, a hundred, a thousand. Do we at some point hit diminishing returns on deterrence while the repugnance of an undeserving person suffering this becomes unbearable to you?
It does if you don't fall in the lizardman constant. I guarantee you that outside weird rationalist forums, you'll find essentially nobody at all, and certainly no death penalty opponents, who say that there is an acceptable level of innocents killed by the state. Yes, if you do say that, my argument isn't relevant.
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