Especially if they are Mexican
The alternative being? I mean, you know that the majority of people in our prisons are there for non-violent offenses, right? Theft, drug crimes, and so on. What would you have us do with these people?
Let them outside to play in the rec area.
Then nuke them from orbit. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.
What a great way to ensure the true destruction of humanity.
Hey - in all fairness, if I do have to die, dying as the punchline to an Aliens joke is not a bad end.
So civilization has broken down in the US to the extent that food shipment (by land, sea, or air) has ceased for weeks. Evacuating the affected areas is also a no-go or that would have already happened. The rest of the world is either completely uncaring or has been effectively destroyed by this same event.
People across the country (and almost certainly the world) have been starving to death for weeks, likely lack clean drinking water and electricity, nearly every resource is going to be in short supply or already non-existent.
But it wasn’t bad until those prisoners were released. :rolleyes:
Most prisoners are going to be released at some point anyway. Very few prisoners are given actual life sentences.
That’s probably a Constitutional requirement at that point. Keeping someone locked in a cell without providing food probably qualifies as “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Probably also a due process issue. If prisons starved prisoners to death, it would be de facto capital punishment for people who had not been sentenced to that.
I can get behind the idea of convicts being released in a given scenario that might be classified as extinction level or what have you. But while there is probably nothing on paper, is there a group or tier that would never be allowed to see the light of day.
Even if that means letting them starve.
Declan
For a fairly bizarre look at what might happen, you could try Eric Flint’s book Time Spike, in which an entire Federal Penitentiary is flung back into prehistory with no contact with the present day!
It’s loosly related to his Ring of Fire books but stands reasonably well on it’s own.
There are already huge gangs of criminals preying on the public, what is a few more?
This sounds like one of the dilemmas used to test Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. If you are ever given that test, remember you get the highest score by reasoning as abstractly as possible from “universal ethical principals”.
I really doubt any courts (except maybe the odd military tribunal) would still be operating at that point. :dubious: And even if the government is still somewhat organized at the point it can solve the issue by immediately pardoning the officers involved and if the legislature ever reconvenes using sovereign imunity to prevent any lawsuits by surviving next of kin. Hell, in the UK for example anything could be made legal by Parliament, either before or after TEOTWAWKI.
Honestly I suspect that many guards would outright kill the most dangerous of the inmates (e.g. multiple murders, murders behind bars, attempts to kill guards), easily dismissing their executions as acts of self-defense if the need arose. In short, let the non-violent guys go in mass, hand select the violent guys/ lifers. A messy plan at best, to be sure, but probably not too far off what would happen.
Getting anything to stick to the guards once some semblance of authority returned would be as difficult as pinning war crimes on units in Vietnam. Who is to say that the death row guys weren’t rioting when they were shot? CCTV tapes might be incriminating, but they could easily have been “lost” or “damaged.”