Yes they work; many do. It’s a burden on society since it drives down wages for people outside of prison. And it encourages every harsher laws to provide ever more cheap labor.
And of course the courts probably wouldn’t bother to look, and even more innocent people would be punished without recourse.
Because we like to pretend we are better than they are. We aren’t all that much better, of course as threads like this demonstrate. As does the popularity of wars of aggression. Most people simply prefer to have the government do their killing for them so they can pretend innocence.
I am not against the death penalty but Supermax prisons exist as both federal, state and subsets of those in lots of places in the U.S. They are very close to what you are describing.
For those of you who have said it’s okay to execute innocent people, but want to do everything in your power to execute guilty people, you do realize that by executing innocent people, you are ensuring that guilty people are never brought to justice. Once a man is executed for a crime, no state will ever go back and review the case to assure they got the right person, which means that person *is *free and walking the streets able to kill again.
FWIW, I am very much against the death penalty in every instance for philosophical, moral, and practical reasons. The fact that there are people in this country who espouse executing innocent people as acceptable collateral damage disgusts me. And people like Justice Scalia who are in a position to stop this outrage, but don’t because they can legally justify it, makes me sad and embarrassed for our country. People like that really aren’t interested in justice; they are interested in revenge and being right.
So, what body makes the determination that it is, in fact, you in that grainy, black-and-white video? That’s where the “legal masturbation” you’d like to do away with comes in and RNATB’s point.
Unless you are of the Judge Dredd frame of mind and don’t see the need for the checks and balances of the judicial system.
Ask the people who lost friends and families in the Lockerbie bombing if “life in prison” works. Eight-fucking-years for killing 243 people. That works out to about two weeks per person. Is that justice by anti-death penalty standards?
You have a very simplistic understanding of the way things work in reality.
Why do you think prisons are expensive? Have you ever looked at the breakdown of a prison system budget? California spends over $10 billion per year on its prison system and, today, employ over 45,000 officers, one in ten of them earning over $100,000 per year. That’s 45,000 officers for over 167,000 inmates, many of which are recidivists convicted under the “Three Strikes” policy implemented by Republican Pete Wilson. Many of those convictions were for non-violent, relatively minor crimes.
The problem of prison expense is due to overly draconian laws and mismanagement of budgets. It’s not the “perks” or rehabilitation efforts that cause outrage prison budgets (as noted in the article linked above); it’s that we don’t do enough to offer rehabilitation in the form of education and job training to those whose only career opportunity appears to be crime. It costs a lot more to maintain the status quo and simply house inmates until their eventual release than it is to improve their ability to obtain gainful employment outside of prison.
You want to ship them to an island in the South Pacific? What island and what other country do we have to impose upon to secure this island? How much do you think it will cost to build the infrastructure on the island for basic things like potable water? How much do you think it will cost to ship inmates there and continuously supply them? What would make that cheaper to do thousands of miles of away than it is on our own soil? Who’s going to administrate this island penitentiary and guard these inmates and how much will that cost? You clearly haven’t given this plan much thought.
Part of what separates us from other places in the world is how we treat our inmates. Unfortunately, it’s notashumane as it should be. If you’d prefer to live in a country that treats its citizens, be they poor or criminal, inhumanely, there are plenty of third-world nations you can relocate to. I’m sure you’ll find, though, that life isn’t quite the utopia you expect it to be.
None of that really has anything directly to do with the death penalty. California houses only a small fraction of its inmate population on death row. The cost of the death penalty lies mainly in the practical imperative of getting it right. Because executing innocent people is not only morally reprehensible, but it does nothing to serve justice and it does nothing to serve the American people, nor keeps us safer.
We don’t even pretend to rehab prisoners anymore. Revenge and punishment have won out over actually helping people get better.
Murderers especially serial killers are sick. These people have no feelings for fellow human beings. If we get a DNA test and learn to recognize there is something wrong at birth, should we kill them when they are born?
We are killing impaired people. They are often products of sick and abusive parents. They have mental problems. Some are retarded and do not know what they are doing.
Yup. If taking a life is taboo, except in self-defense, I find it far more sinister that someone could do it for a job and remain normal, than that some nutjob is doing it because his dog told him to do so.
I don’t think my understanding is simplistic. The costs are high due to huge numbers of prison guards, expensive buildings, long sentences, and high numbers of prisoners.
The S. Pacific island thing…you’d cart them there and forget them. It would be up to them to survive. YOu could station a couple naval vessels offshore and shoot any that try to escape. This is said somewhat in jest.
A prison camp would be CHEAPER at least I would think so. You’d house the least violent in a POW like camp with a much smaller number of prison guards. They’d do actual work like pick vegetables or build roads…this would somewhat help them when they were released. The conditions would be much better than a conventional prison, ie they could move around, etc.
In WW2 we housed something like 1M German POWs. It couldn’t have been that expensive.
The more guard intensive, concrete intensive jails would be left for the true incorrigible savages.
I lost a friend. The guy who ran our swim club was a Pan Am pilot, and he was on that plane coming back from London after buying some gifts for his wife.
Letting the guy go to a long life would be wrong. Letting him leave to die very soon is fine with me. He’s got his death penalty now.
Well, you may not think so, but it is. I just told you all that, but you did not address those issues when you suggested slave labor camps for the “truly bad people.”
Even slave labor camps require infrastructure and administration and those things cost money. In addition to (or as an alternative to? I can’t figure that out) slave labor camps for the dregs of the dregs of society, you want to ship out the rest of the prison population to some random South Pacific island and leave them there for how long? The rest of their lives? You do realize that the majority of the prison population is not serving life sentences, right?
Oh, right. You were just joking. Let us know when you decide to come off your little comic routine and actually debate. I just want to be sure you don’t really expect the federal government to further strain our military resources by sending personnel and ships out to the middle of the ocean to stand guard indefinitely over the entire U.S. inmate population, do you? You were just joking, right? That’s a knee-slapper!
Now, we’re back to the prison camps. Please tell me where you will be erecting your spacious prison camp, how many inmates your camp will house and in what manner, how many guards you will require for the inmates, both while within the grounds and outside the grounds while picking lettuce and building roads, and how picking lettuce on the inside helps inmates once they are released. Exactly what skills are you providing them to re-enter society as a productive member of a country already in the grips of massive unemployment? How to pull vegetables out of the ground? Seriously?
In the U.S., by the end of WWII, there were over 500 camps housing more than 425,000 POWs and guarded by military personnel. How expensive do you think it was? Better yet let’s have numbers. Do keep in mind that as of June, 2008, the DOJ reported 2.3 million inmates being held in federal, state or local prisons/jails. That is more than fives times the number of POWs held in the U.S. in WWII. Also, keep in mind that because the U.S. inmate population is held by multiple government agencies, the cost per inmate varies widely.
So, you’re saying that you would require more guards for fewer inmates in certain circumstances, thereby raising the cost per inmate?
I don’t really understand what wars of aggression have to do with the death penalty. But in what way does providing comfortable living for a convicted murderer make us better than him? Heck, in what way does not executing a convicted murderer make us better than him? I could argue that it makes us worse, because what we’re doing is allowing a clear and present danger to society to remain in that society.
I’ll just say this again: Society has the duty to protect itself and to remove dangerous elements from itself. As things stand now, executing people who have demonstrated the danger they present to society is the only way to effectively remove those people. Give me an alternative that accomplishes complete and total removal and I’ll listen.
So, obviously, they are nowhere close to what I described, inmates still have contact with the outside world. My point is that society needs a way to remove destructive elements completely. Right now, Supermax ain’t even close.
I also note how, even the limited isolation of the current Supermax system is called “inhuman” and “torture” by some. So clearly, a prison that imposed complete and utter isolation from the outside world would be out of the question. And we’re left with only execution.