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chaosmage  11mo ago (text post)   2201 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.

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