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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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I'm coming to the conclusion that we're doing it all wrong.

The current U.S. system seems to imprison to few people (yes, too few) for too short a period of time, but it makes the experience hellish.

We should have more people in prison and longer sentences as well. This is the best and maybe only way to reduce the amount of violent crime to tolerable levels. It worked in the 1990s and it will work again. To make this politically palatable we should make prisons as humane as possible. This would also reduce the damage of false imprisonment. I don't care if violent sociopaths are pampered as long as they are removed from society.

The cost of this proposal? Nothing compared to the savings from having a drastically lower rate of crime.

Violent crime is already at tolerable levels.

You and I are probably not going to get murdered, but that's cold comfort to a male born in Detroit whose chance of dying via murder is about 8% before age 80.

(Calculated based on a male homicide rate of 100/100,000 per year).

That's just murder. How many more people are shot or stabbed and don't die? How many inner cities are hollowed out wastelands?

And of course, this is a very American perspective. How do you think an average European would feel if their murder rate increased by 5x to American levels. Or how would a Japanese person feel to see a 25x increase in murder rates?

I think violent crime is an order of magnitude too high and that the benefit of lowering crime far outweighs the cost.

Ya lower the burden of proof and nab multiples to an order of magnitude more people, kinda based on crime, kind of on speculation... but make it nice, have pools, maternity ward... And don't make it so dour and metalic and institutional, you could have a nice open air town type setup... sure barb wire and guards around, but we could even let them have specialized work and band... it wouldn't be so much a prison... It'd be like going to Camp!

Oh wait...

Seriously this is what concentration camps are. This is what the British said they were doing to the Boer, what Canada and Britain did to Germans and Ukrainians in ww1, what the US did to the Japanese, and what the Gulags and Auschwitz at least nominally started off as when they were "merely" replicating the Tsar's prison camps and Germany's WW1 prison camps.

That sounds a lot more like an old-timey insane asylum. Conditions there were often horrific.

So? Are you implying that a human concentration camp is a special atrocity in a way that a hellish prison is not? To the extent we think concentration camps are bad at all, isn't it that we disagree with the reasons people were forced to be there? Why would violent crime make this list?

The horror of concentration camps was the loss of due process of law and basic rights of citizenship.

Once you can be deprived of freedom indefinitely with a crime being proven or even charged, merely the expediency of the state, well execution is also a punishment the state meets out.

If you can be imprisoned without a proper trial or due process, execution without trial or due process is merely a matter of degree.

All the data I’ve seen says prison sentences are far too long. I’ll mostly reference Tabarrok who’s done a lot of work there. Simplistically people age out of crime. And criminals generally respond better to more consistent policing and punishment than less consistent and longer.

We can both be right. I'd agree that a 50 year sentence or whatever is too long for all but the most heinous of crimes. There is no need to keep old men in prison. I'd also agree that people who commit non-violent offenses should be given swift, sure, but not too severe punishment.

It's also clear to me that under no circumstances should a murderer or a person with multiple violent crimes be released before age 35.

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