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"If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation."

Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. They're usually in situations people would rather ignore. They're desperate. They want attention and they get it at some price that's ultimately... above market.

According to http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-m... the average age of mass shooters in general is 35.

I was only talking about school shootings but I still didn't expect it to be that high. Too bad it didn't have the median.

>Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children.

eric_the_read's comment notwithstanding, people subjected to extreme circumstances in their childhood years are less likely to be rehabilitated, not more.

The argument is that someone willing to shoot up a school for attention is beyond rehabilitation. His age is irrelevant to someone making that claim, and possibly argues in his favor.

The attention we're talking about here isn't narcissistic supply. It's basic interpersonal human concern. Shooting up a school because you're being systematically starved of your basic human needs isn't nearly as bad as you just made is sound. Otherwise I never contended with anything else you said. I do think they deserve a chance at rehabilitation but also that they're less likely to attain it.

I'm just pointing out that your argument isn't very effective. I actually agree with you, but someone taking the position that school shooters aren't rehabilitable isn't going to care whether or not they're minors. Their argument supersedes notions of maturity.

You're not refuting an argument I made. Read it again. I was simply trying to highlight the point at which we might actually have some meaningful effect on the problem. Hint: punishment is irrelevant.

Your point about 20 years vs 1 is really important. Sentences have gotten so long for relatively harmless crimes that benchmarking becomes distorted. If anyone thinks about all the tings they will do in the next 3 years, then compare that to losing 20 years it can help show how long of a sentence that is.

Criminal sentences have their own flavor of inflation that seems rarely studied.

* in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.

Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example.

Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished.

A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason.

France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.

> our jails are full

I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%.

If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting the social network of the inmate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

Your point is well-taken and I agree insofar as the solution is not to build more prisons.

My point is simply that not punishing people isn't a viable solution, either. France has the same problem as the US (too many people incarcerated) and an equally bad solution (stop incarcerating altogether).

So? Our jails are way above capacity in the US, but we're still handing out long sentences.

About this:

"Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform."

How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system:

http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe

While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice.

The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system.

A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.

Yeah, I can't say that. I'm not sure Schöffe is a silver bullet solution but that a jury is "the best we've got" is unlikely. Valid point.

The purpose of a jury isn't necessarily to make the best, most legally correct decision. The purpose of a jury is to put the people in control of the state.

One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.

The bigger issue is that these things are hard to test and noone is willing to run the tests. In theory the US has a good setup for a state to decide to do some testing but politics make it impossible (and there's a decent ethical argument for either side that is far from simple). I mean think about the reactions if some politician would say "we need to see if our courts are as good as they can be, I propose we get rid of the jury system and replace it with X to see if X is superior"

1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be.

2) Lol crackpot.

3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time.

4) Lol crackpot.

Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship. I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.

Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time. In all the common law countries you list, this is basically unheard of, at least in the last 400 years.

Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.

Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder. The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries. That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.

> Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time.

Some civil law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years. Some common law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years (e.g.: English revolution, detainment of Americans with Japenese ancestry during World War 2).

> Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.

Except when it doesn’t serve the common interests very well by, for example, maintaining the legality of slavery well past the point it was abolished in many (civil and common law) countries and by taking another 100 years to reconsider the whole apartheid thing. In comparison, the civil law countries in Scandinavia seem to have faired quite well on the civil rights front and it was also civil, not common, law countries that drove the spearhead for women’s suffrage.

> Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder.

Ah, yes, the famous French common law system based not at all on the Code Napoleon and the equally famous Soviet common law system.

> The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries.

Again, the English revolution comes to mind. Or that whole debacle where slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war in the 1860s! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland weren’t exactly hotspots of instability either. And to be honest, I am not sure that Quebec has seen many more fascist dictators than the rest of Canada, something that would be implied by its civil law nature?

> That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.

Except, of course, when you can.

Well we'll see how long Europe can go before it completely burns itself down. I think we are up to almost 70 years (the record is what, 99 years?).

The main idea behind the jury system is to provide a further check upon the power of government. Unless there is a system which does a better job of that, then, from the point of view of liberal government, there is no point in reviewing it.

"We build jails for people we're afraid of, and fill them with people we're mad at

We put the people we're genuinely afraid of in extralegal holding facilities instead. (Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.)

Oh my, that is quite scary, but I'm sure you have no examples.

He was talking about Guantanamo, presumably ("extralegal holding facility")

Also involuntary commitment facilities. While there is some truly deranged people out there, psychology has a long history of being abused to remove individuals by giving them false labels of mental disorders (or otherwise vastly overstating any disorders the person does have).

I honestly question if GP is being sarcastic because this is a thing acknowledged by the US government, they wont even release some prisoners from gitmo that they acknowledge are innocent of crimes.

And dont forget CIA blacksites!

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksi...

Bush admits to secret prisons(wikipedia sources are your friend): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com...

We do have prisons where we keep people without trial.

We don't, as far as I know, have entire prisons where we hold people without trial because they 'know secrets' and we are afraid they might tell them. In fact, I don't know of a single instance of this, outside of people who agreed to keep some secret but then changed their mind (snowden).

Fair, but I dont think anyone made that claim.

But that's EXACTLY what they said???

>>Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.

> An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.

I think that you here implicitly assume that there is overwhelming evidence of who is the author of the crime. For example, all of these: Many survivors testimonies (be careful, they are not so reliable in practice), many videos of the massacre were the face of the attacked is clearly visible, a perfect matching of the ADN in few blood spots, fingerprint in the weapons, gunpowder marks in the hands, he/she is detained in situ while trying to kill more people, ...

Does this case has overwhelming evidence?

> Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case.

Please read the rest of the post before commenting. It's possible to believe all of these things at once:

(i) An eye for an eye is useful and works.

(ii) Glossip should not be in jail, and even less so, killed.

(ii) pg is correct in his reasoning for why US should not have the death penalty.

An eye for an eye creates bad incentives. If the state is going to kill as punishment for some crime, rationally a criminal should go for broke once that line is crossed. In the worst case, they'll be killed by police. Trapping someone just dissuades them from surrender.

That same logic goes for anybody who has already earned the maximum possible punishment for their crime. If there was no death penalty, and kidnapping+rape earned you life without parole, why not kill the victim too? That way you have a better chance of getting away with it.

Re: an eye for an eye.

My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."

This is not Solomon's phrase, it's Hammurabi's - it originated a thousand years before Solomon in Babylonian law. It also exists in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (i.e. the books of Moses), which preceded Solomon. Pastor needs to study his Bible better...

Yeah, I'm kind of undecided. I can imagine the death penalty being appropriate for the really egregious crimes. However, I just don't trust governments to carry it out correctly.