While you can argue life without parole may be crueler, depending on the circumstances of the incarceration, it’s just a more extreme argument for why living in general is crueler than being dead. And the vast majority of people either don’t buy that argument, or they accept that life is crueler than death and live on despite it for other reasons. Humans are simply born to live, not die. Like another post said, the cruelest situation would be giving them no opportunity for meaningful activity or stimulation because then they wouldn’t be living, they’d simply be existing.
That said, I’m for allowing people to exercise their right to life, and implicitly right to death, in the same way I think non-incarcerated people should be allowed to exercise it. But that’s a different conversation.
One of my wife’s former students has been serving a life sentence for about 20 years now. We’ve visited him a couple of times. As Qadgop said, he seems to have adjusted to prison life, he has some privileges, and is allowed to socialize somewhat. I won’t say he’s happy in prison, but he’s shown no desire to be dead, either.
What the reaction of someone who’s in solitary would be, I have no idea.
Your friends example illustrates exactly why life imprisonment sans parole is preferable to a death sentence. The *without parole *means " although in 20 years or so we might change our mind, grant you privileges, send you to a half way house, work release, remit". A death sentence means you discuss your options with God.
Agree. People will typically select the tougher-sounding option on the Internet - “If given the choice between death or life imprisonment I want to be put to death and not have to languish behind bars.” But in real life it would probably be different.
The fact that more people on death row have NOT tried to kill themselves than have seems to debunk yours. Whether one choice is worse than the other is a matter of personal opinion.
There is only one Federal supermax prison in the US. There are several state supermax prisons, and many state maximum security prisons have supermax wings.
Thanks, Qadgop. Have you yourself ever worked in a supermax or a prison with a supermax wing? One wonders what sort of psychiatric or medical problems could arise in men (or women?) subjected to such conditions
I’ve got a pretty bad case of agoraphobia coupled with claustrophobia, so I’d rather face a death sentence than spend even a month in solitary confinement…or a few days stuck in an elevator (I avoid elevators/planes/bridges/traffic jams, etc., like the plague). Heck, I even refuse to be buried unless it’s in a Safety Coffin. :eek:
I have not been in our state’s supermax. But I’m good friends with the doc who worked there for over a decade. It was tremendously stressful on him, dealing with patients who were constantly angry, depressed, hostile, disinhibited, and poorly socialized. Sit by yourself for 23 hours a day with nothing meaningful to do, and all your discomforts and problems (mental, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical) get somatized into physical pain, and all you do is complain bitterly about your horrible physical pain the entire time. And that’s a pain that no pill will cure.
Eventually he moved to a medium security prison where he’s much happier, as are his patients.
Not to derail the thread, but if the idea of SuperMax is safety, then doesn’t creating mentally ill prisoners make things *less *safe for the staff, not the other way around? Sure, make the facility as escape-proof as possible, but there’s no reason to make the patients mentally ill through this sort of isolation and suffering, unless you just want to be punitive.
Yes. It’s survival instinct, I think. The same thing that keeps people trying to survive when a hopeless disaster befalls them (that is, the kind of disaster that doesn’t necessarily kill immediately, but is pretty inevitably unsurvivable for some situations.)
I don’t think the intention was to create crazy people, but that seems to have been an effect of it.
The isolation of SuperMax isn’t just to protect the staff and public, it’s also to protect the prisoners from each other as some of them actually were pretty violent prior to being put in SuperMax (some were not).
There have been people who preferred such isolation - one such was Charles Harrelson Probably safe to say he was an outlier even before he was incarcerated.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of sentences being aimed at making the criminal feel bad. I support legal actions that are designed with the communities best interests in mind.
I think that life without parole is good for the community for two reasons:
it prevents the criminal from doing more damage;
it prevents the community from accidentally killing the wrong person.
The old maximum security jail in vic.aus made prisoners crazy. The even older Long Bay maximum security prison in nsw.aus turned prisoners into psychotic killers. Both of those were replaced with maximum security divisions that were /less/ like a supermax, but it wasn’t primarily because of the danger to staff. They were expensive to run, and the ex-prisoners could not be successfully released into the general prison population, so once they filled up, they were full. That meant that they didn’t contribute to general prison management.
I’m with you. For me, any long-term involuntary confinement in a coercive environment (with disrespectful attitude, the giving of orders, deliberate deprivations, punishment, etc) would be worse than just killing me. I like your solution and I’d expand it to anyone sentenced to +5 years.