Well… on one side, it’s a complete curtailment of personal freedoms. On another side, all of your basic needs are provided for, and you don’t have to work another day in your life. Personally, I think I’d rather live- especially if there’s some access to books.
You’re actually arguing that an individual tax payer having to spend a few pennies a year on long-term incarceration is not only torturous, but more torturous than being locked in solitary confinement for years?
So, if given the opportunity to relieve your torture, you would volunteer to switch places with one of those bad guys?
I think that fear of death is 1) stronger than most of the “I’d rather die than be locked up forever” folks would acknowledge, and also 2) is intensified by the nature of death row; knowing that you will be executed and that that day is getting closer and closer on a fixed schedule.
Good observation! You nailed it !
Not all people sentence to death wind up in death row…case in point…William Josiah McMeen, Port Royal, PA, 1886 was charged and convicted of killing his wife by poisoning. He was alleged to have told her that while he was off to Harrisburg trying to get a job with the RR, he would stop in Mifflin and get her some medicine for her ailments. (pregnant, perhaps). The prosecution alleged he deliberately sent strychnine for killing rats (they did have a huge rat problem in their old house) without a label and that he figured she would take it and die, relieving him of an unwanted marriage. The talk was that they ‘had to’ marry, and that he was still tomcatting around. Whatever, he was convicted by the local jury who took a number of votes before deciding. Sentenced to hang, he escaped jail and was recaptured, but the governor, hearing the pleas of his connected friends, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.
Fast forward 32 years, he was finally able to gain parole. While in prison he was not in solitary, but, rather, learned the locksmith trade, became a skilled mechanic for maintaining the prison machinery, took over the fire brigade of the prison, and raised vegetables and exotic plants in the prison greenhouse. The warden described him as an ideal prisoner.
so, sometimes long term incarceration can make a difference. What happened to him? No one seems to know. He said he intended to ‘go to the country’, never back to Port Royal, and had several offers of employment. He would have been around 63 or 64 when released.
I’ve long thought that we as a society have never really answered that question. In some ways, we’ve tried to have it be both… and it often turns out to be neither.
Miller said what I would have said…
If the few dollars per year of your taxes that go towards housing prisoners is more torturous than incarceration itself, then how horrifically agonizing must it be when hundreds or thousands of your tax dollars, every year, go towards national defense, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.?
We have the highest percentage in the world of citizens incarcerated, even for murders.
What percentage of drug offenders come out of prison as an improved person? What percentage as a person less likely to be a contributor to society?
So many capital offenders, or, perhaps, people convicted of murder, have been found not guilty after DNA and other evidence is presented, many many years later…cops say that even if the perp is not the perp, he still deserved to be convicted because he was not a ‘good guy’.
Capital punishment is not appropriate except when there is absolutely no doubt as to clear-headed intention and indentification.
I recently watched the Werner Herzog documentary Into The Abyss and was struck by how the death penalty took a toll on not the inmate but by the prison staff that had to deal with the executions. They had the prison guard that had to manage everyone else and witnessed a bunch of executions, a big burly man’s man type of guy who almost seemed a real-life version of Tom Hanks character on The Green Mile. He tried to be very professional and treated the people facing execution with respect and dignity. It wasn’t until he was at the execution of a female and how she thanked him that something inside him finally snapped emotionally and he could no longer perform his job and had a near mental breakdown, he quit his job, giving up his pension he had been working toward for years because he couldn’t take it anymore. The interview is worth a look: