Capital Punishment: Should the Death Penalty Still Exist In A 'Civilised Society'?

If by deterrent you mean 100% success rate.

Yeah how is prison not a deterrent?

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/images/PewPollRace.png

This makes sense, considering the demographic makeup of the national prison population.

We execute more people than the country that hosted Osama Bin Laden for almost decade.

I think destroying poverty is the real deterrent. Make sure life on the outside isn't hopeless. That's why Denmark has such nice prisons (I toured one once, the cell block was way nicer than my dorm) and so few violent crimes.

I mean there's probably some point at which making prison even MORE bad doesn't make it even MORE deterrent, I'm not fucking Sherriff Joe Arpaio here, I'm not saying "torture the fuckers, they're criminals," I'm just trying to get a handle on what a penal system should hypothetically do and whether death should be absolutely excluded from it. Although the best argument for excluding it is probably that you never get a "hypothetical penal system," you get a real one where execution decisions are going to be made on fucked up grounds by people with the wrong motives or flawed judgment.

I guess they could start by freeing all the nonviolent drug offenders in states where that drug is now legal.

Freeing all nonviolent drug offenders period

I said my piece upthread, where I start by saying:

Putting emotions aside (always difficult in this debate), the death penalty does not serve any interest of the state that could not be better served through other means.

I still stand by that post.

Yep

Yeah, in prison they can live, they can work, I don't know, make license plates, do manufacturing jobs, something productive.

The result of this outlook is pretty much slave labor, so no. Prisoners aren't in there to turn an additional profit for the private commercial prison system OR the state. Doing time IS the punishment; enforced hard labor is not.

I just fundamentally find life-sentence with no parole = ok, death penalty = not ok a little bit philosophically hard to grasp and a little hard to reconcile with the idea that it's about "compassion."

How rampant is prison rape, really? The degree to which people accept that happens -- and joke about it -- is almost more horrifying to me than the death penalty, especially when you consider all the nonviolent people who are locked up. The degree to which people dehumanize prisoners seems like a major moral failing in out culture.

otm

The compassion part is in NOT taking a life. It's pretty simple.

Xpost in orbit, that's a point I've always wondered about, the point about work. Freud said that work and love are the two main things people need and I do kind of think it's inhumane/dis empowering to have people sitting around with no responsibilities. But what kind of work wouldn't be exploitative if assigned to a prisoner?

You may not see the value of life sentence with no parole, but if the other choice is death then you don't see the value in their life at all.

I just fundamentally find life-sentence with no parole = ok, death penalty = not ok a little bit philosophically hard to grasp and a little hard to reconcile with the idea that it's about "compassion."

― Doritos Loco Parentis (Hurting 2), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 10:52 PM (2 minutes ago)

i'm not in favor of mandatory -- or even common -- life without parole sentences, but you can't possibly say you don't understand how taking someone's life away is a profound step beyond keeping that person in prison, where at least he will be able to live some sort of life, however meaningless it may be

also to in orbit's point: isn't "hard labor" a thing of the past? i was under the impression that prisoners couldn't be compelled to work. i don't see anything wrong with having them do work if it means more privileges etc in return for the labor, though

Yeah i never said forced work. Just have that option available.

How rampant is prison rape, really? The degree to which people accept that happens -- and joke about it -- is almost more horrifying to me than the death penalty, especially when you consider all the nonviolent people who are locked up. The degree to which people dehumanize prisoners seems like a major moral failing in out culture.

― très hip (Treeship), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 10:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's pretty rampant iirc and something that I don't think should be joked about or tolerated at all.

It's one of the big deterrents.

Seriously though it's no wonder our prisons are so bad if people in America think so little of prisoners that the idea of them suffering sexual abuse is seen as funny. Attitudes need to change.

Freud said that work and love are the two main things people need

This is so unqualified that it's meaningless. Work they choose, work they're proud of, work that is meaningful to humans and not exploitative. Work for its own sake irrespective of quality, safety, and without respect for humanity is punishment for needing to work, ie not being rich.

You could start a prison rape thread, treesh, and we could all join you in deploring it. Except a few of the resident part-time trolls, of course.

Looking up favorability rates for capital punishment has been a big eye-opener for me. I had no idea it was so popular in this country. It's sort of scary.

it's inhumane/dis empowering to have people sitting around with no responsibilities.

Utter condescending nonsense. EVERYONE ALREADY HAS RESPONSIBILITIES. To their families, friends, communities--to themselves, to live the tiniest bit better and with less privation or struggle. People "sit around," as you say, when other choices are unavailable to them because of access, education, availability, etc, and when the small number of options for paid labor if and when they even exist are so punishing and deliver so little reward that it's a defense of your own humanity not to take them.

i might be totally wrong about the work requirement thing, i'm really not familiar with the issue

The popularity of this is doubly scary when you consider the biggest supporters are self-proclaimed Christians. I don't know how they fail to realize this, but Jesus was a victim of capital punishment! He also said turn the other cheek! This stuff isn't exactly buried in the Bible.

Looking up favorability rates for capital punishment has been a big eye-opener for me.

support in the us has fallen fairly dramatically over the last 10-20 years. even people who think that hardcore no-doubt serial killers deserve death are learning that it's never that clear-cut

In the USA there are state prisons with 50 different sets of rules, plus federal prisons with varying levels of security and thererfore a different set of rules for each level.

America is unusual among rich countries in that it still executes people. It does so because its politicians are highly responsive to voters, who mostly favour the death penalty. However, that majority is shrinking, from 80% in 1994 to 60% last year. Young Americans are less likely to support it than their elders. Non-whites, who will one day be a majority, are solidly opposed. Six states have abolished it since 2007, bringing the total to 18 out of 50. The number of executions each year has fallen from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year.

To the extent I am unsure on an abstract level whether it should be completely banned, I still think we execute too many people and generally favor the decline of its usage here.

Xpost in orbit I don't disagree with anything you said. I was just thinking out loud about ways prisons could soften the spiritual blow of taking away someone's autonomy. I definitely don't think anyone should profit off prison labor, certainly not private contractors, or that prisoners should do work they don't choose to do. I was thinking like, shifts at the prison library or something to break up the monotony of sitting in a cell. I'm a big fan of the programs that allow prisoners to work toward college degrees.

being in favor of the death penalty as a thing that the gov't should do makes you a monster imo full stop

thinking that murder rapists should die horribly is fine, i get it, that is a basic human response to disgusting behavior (cf dude that buried that woman alive, one of the most horrible things i can imagine, i hope that guy dies in a terr---OH WAIT). we are all allowed to take revenge in our brains

but if you can't pump the brakes between "i wanna kill that motherfucker, or at least know that he died in a sick way" and "the gov't should kill the people i hate and think are bad" then there is no hope for you.

Why do Americans commit so many horrifying crimes?

why are there crows

There are a lot of them stacked up next to each other, and work/consumerism is spiritually fulfilling.

unfulfilling i mean, gah.

we are def number one at shooting each other, but horrifying crimes are the sort of thing that humans are great at worldwide

gbx otm

Humans worldwide also look up to the US culturally, and our consumerist culture is by nature self-destructive and violent. Just look at how much murder is on TV vs. sex.

Janet Jackson's titty upsetting the purity of two dozen giant men repeatedly running into each other.

Frederick earlier was talking about how that one killer is infamous in Denmark. In the US we have had hundreds of serial killers over the past several decades.

Maybe there aren't more horrifying crimes here than elsewhere but it seems that way.

That's because the TV is saturated and oversaturated with cop dramas and has been since the 70s.

gbx otm. this is a moral issue: you're either cool with the government killing people or you're not, imo

gbx is highly otm and adam bruneau has a thing or two to learn about worldwide humans' upward looks.

but if you can't pump the brakes between "i wanna kill that motherfucker, or at least know that he died in a sick way" and "the gov't should kill the people i hate and think are bad" then there is no hope for you.

Because you don't *really* think the person should die, and you recognize that it's just a vengeful fantasy, or because you aren't comfortable with someone actually having the responsibility for doing the thing you think should be done?

I guess I'm feeling overly thought-experimenty and I know ILX usually does not like thought experiment mode (and usually neither do I), but I'm just trying to figure out if we're saying that the death penalty could/should never possibly be a punishment under any circumstances or we're saying the death penalty as it exists is fucked. Because if it's the latter I 100% agree and I would much rather have a world with no death penalty at all than what we have now. If it's the former, I think I agree but I'm not completely sure. Ultimately if the government was about to completely ban the death penalty I'd be the last person to be unhappy about it.

gbx otm. this is a moral issue: you're either cool with the government killing people or you're not, imo

― k3vin k., Thursday, May 1, 2014 12:35 AM (15 minutes ago)

this is clear, right?