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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People keep accusing me of being "uncharitable" when I claim that utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing because in order to remain logically consistent it must inevitably devolve into either mindless wire-heading or a fucking death cult. And yet here we are with one of my "strawmen" made flesh asking do we really need to value life? Really? and why cant we just euthanize the people [user] doesn't like.
On the off chance you're just naive and ignorant rather than a troll, the answer to your question in the OP is; No, we shouldn't, because we've already established that this is a slippery slope, and at the bottom of this slope lies a mountain of skulls.
You as a utilitarian may see that as a fair trade for some nebulous benefit but I do not
Why do you think this has anything to do with utilitarianism? Utilitarianism doesn't value the lives and well-being of mass-murderers any less than it values anyone else. It only recommends harming them as an instrumental goal to serve a more important purpose, such as saving the lives of others. A 20-year-old who raped and killed a dozen children still has plenty of potential QALYs to maximize, even adjusting his life-quality downward to account for being in prison. It's expensive but governments spends plenty of money on things with lower QALY returns than keeping prisoners alive. Also OP only differs from conventional death-penalty advocacy in that he seems concerned with the prisoners consenting, proposing incentivizing suicide instead of just executing them normally, and once again that is not something utilitarianism is particularly concerned with except in instrumental terms.
The utilitarian approach would be to estimate the deterrent and removal-from-public effect of execution/suicide-incentivization/life-in-prison/etc. and then act accordingly to maximize the net welfare of both criminals and their potential victims. It doesn't terminally value punishing evil people like much of the population does, though I think rule-utilitarianism would recommend such punishment as a good guideline for when it's difficult to estimate the total consequences. (In Scott's own Unsong the opposition of utilitarians to the existence of Hell is a plot point, reflecting how utilitarianism doesn't share the common tendency towards valuing punishment as a terminal goal.) But neither is utilitarianism like BLM in that it cares more about a couple dozen unarmed black people getting shot in conflicts with police than about thousands of additional murder victims and fatal traffic accidents per year from a pullback in proactive policing. That's just classic trolley-problem material: if one policy causes a dozen deaths at the hands of law-enforcement, and the other policy causes thousands of deaths but they're "not your fault", then it's still your responsibility to make the choice with the best overall consequences. There are of course secondary consequences to consider like the effect on police PR affecting cooperation with police, but once you're paying attention to the numbers I think it's very difficult to argue that they change the balance, especially when PR is driven more by media narratives than whether the number is 12 or 25 annually.
Notably, when utilitarians have erred regarding prisoners it seems to have been in the exact opposite direction you're concerned about. A while back someone here linked a critical analysis of an EA organization's criminal-justice-reform funding. They were primarily concerned with the welfare of the criminals rather than with secondary effects like the crime rate. The effect on the welfare of the criminals is easier to estimate, after all, an easy mistake reflecting the importance of utilitarians avoiding the streetlight effect. It was also grossly inefficient compared to other EA causes like third-world health interventions. They did end up jettisoning it (by spinning it off into an independent organization without Open Philanthropy funding), but not before spending $200 million dollars including $50 million on seed funding for the new organization. However, I think a lot of that can be blamed on the influence of social-justice politics rather than on utilitarian philosophy, and at least they ultimately ended up getting rid of it. (How many other organizations blowing money on "criminal justice reform" that turns out to be ineffective or harmful have done the same?). In any case, they hardly seem like they're about to start advocating for OP's proposal.
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