I saw a program last night that said you can not ignore private prisons in the equation. They cut guards to the bone and cut training to improve profits. They have little interest in safety when it is in competition with profits. Their claim of being secure is propaganda to get more prisoners under their control.
Get rid of private prisons.
98.8% don’t. Kill them too?
Would you be willing to be one of those innocents?
I don’t suppose you’d like to apply this argument to fetuses? :dubious:
OR would you be willing to directly kill someone on death row?
I cannot fathom why you would think the first situation is worse than the second. Please explain your reasoning.
Well, one line of arguing could be that in the second case a murderer has killed people. That’s what murderers do. In the first case, the supposed law abiding and righteous have killed people. That’s not what the law abiding and righteous are supposed to do.
If I was innocent of any crime and absolutely had to die at the hands of man I’d far rather be murdered by someone who would be held as wrong for what they had done than, effectively, the whole of society who (as a group) believed they had done nothing wrong.
Look at it this way.
First situation, execute 1000 convicted criminals, and there’s a couple of wrongly accused innocents among them. Result: 2 dead innocents, and 998 dead other people.
Second situation, don’t execute 1000 convicted criminals, one of them escapes and kills 2 innocent people. Result, 2 dead innocents, 998 other people stay alive, and the 2 wrongly accused innocents survive to be acquitted later.
Which would you prefer?
Thing is, a more realistic death penalty scenario is that you have those 1000 inmates; you execute some including those two innocents. And two criminals not on death row escape and kill some people. So in the end you have dead innocents at the hands of both the state and at the hands of criminals.
For that matter, the vast majority of murders are committed by people with no prior murder convictions. Might as well start executing the car thieves, just to be safe.
Fascinating.
Good thing we don’t let convicted criminals decide their own fate, eh?
Look, true believers one one side or the other of this issue have their well-trodden arguments, and cannot be swayed. Nor will most of them admit that the adoption of their position over the other carries real costs and consequences. This is necessarily so - there are trade-offs here that cannot be ignored.
I admire the job the prosecutors do in my county, and they have a lot of experience bringing death-penalty cases to court. (This was the office responsible for prosecuting the Beltway snipers, among others.) They do this in an ethical fashion, by all accounts. If this was so across the country, and if this application of the death penalty did not create massive coordination problems with international law enforcement, I would support it right down the line.
It isn’t, and it does cause these problems, so I have to oppose it, including in my county where it is practiced rather well.
The first situation.
Two innocent people will die either way. In the second situation the recidivism rate for murderers guarantees that some of those 998 people, virtually none of whom will really spend the rest of their lives in jail given even a “life sentence” so often comes with the option for parole after serving 15-35 years, will go on to kill again; one of two large scale studies conducted by the Bureau of Justice concluded that 6.6% of released murderers will be rearrested for murder cite (go to page 2). That’s ~60 more innocent people who will be killed that we know about.
In the first situation, when the murderers have been put to death, the recidivism rate is 0% so no more than the two innocent people who were going to die either way do.
So which do you think is worse: two people who have the chance to go through several years of appeals processes being failed by the system, or at least 62 innocent people being murdered?
Again, I’m going to oppose the death penalty here, but I’m going to do so with full understanding that this position carries some social cost. It would not be fair for me to pretend that everything would be sunshine and posies for choosing this option - just that it is the least bad of the options presented.
Your cite does not distinguish life imprisonment from life without parole, which is a human alternative to the death penalty. So arguing about the recidivism rate of those sentenced to life without parole after they are paroled seems rather foolish.
The assumption in the post you are responding to of a 99.8% conviction accuracy rate is not supported by any evidence I’ve ever seen. I posted a link showing there were at least 13 innocent people on Illinois death row, and I suspect they did a better job than a place like Texas. We really need to compare the number of expected murders by life without parole murderers escaping versus those wrongfully convicted. In this universe, I’d say the latter number is far bigger.
Can anyone argue against that question?
Which is my whole point. For those who say that “well, sometimes we’ll make a mistake,” I sincerely want to know if YOU would be willing to BE that mistake.
Not* after *the execution, they don’t.
Why do you think they’d need to escape? In the only year for which I’ve discovered numbers (1999), eight murders were committed in Texas prisons. Three of those eight murders were committed by capital murderers who had received life sentences rather than capital punishment, more than their share considering they’re such a small percentage of the prison population. Capital murderers kill and injure other inmates and prison guards every year. You need to account for that in your calculus.