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chaosmage  11mo ago (text post)   2221 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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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?

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.

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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