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Comment by aarongough | Hacker News Reader

I actually agree with you far more that my original statement shows. That being said I just can't see how keeping someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life is in any way preferable to just killing them.

They are unable to contribute to society while incarcerated, incarceration is not shown to actually help rehabilitate them, and incarceration costs everyone else a lot of money...

On the other hand: if capital punishment is used then it's pretty clear they'll never get the chance to re-offend. And in cases like this where the criminal has done something truly heinous I think that is the biggest plus possible.

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If capital punishment is used, there's never a chance that someone spuriously found guilty might be able to be vindicated and get some semblance of their life back.

It's better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man hang.

Or at least that 10 guilty men stay in jail, no?

If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.

And won't that be a wonderful world to live in by the way, once the government can accurately read our thoughts. :)

> If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.

Prisons are dangerous places. Putting someone in one often results in their death. (It always does for "life without parole" sentences.)

So, if it's really the death of innocents that bothers you, you can't support imprisonment either.

In fact, if you're actually innocent, you probably want to get sentenced to death because that's the best way to get reasonable review. If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.

Prison is not by definition dangerous. There are plenty of societies that find a dangerous prison to be unacceptable. And then there are others that seem to take grim pleasure in the idea that someone in Prison might be harmed.

> Prison is not by definition dangerous.

The prisons that you're willing to put people in are dangerous.

You argued "innocents may die". Do you really want to amend that to "it's bad if innocents will necessarily die but okay if they die in practice so long as I can convince myself that they needn't die in theory"?

Prisons are indeed dangerous, but it is a matter of degree. You seem to be asserting that there is little practical difference between a life sentence and a death sentence in terms of opportunities to right an unjust conviction. Can you support that with evidence?

Should continue executing people who might be innocent until we can suitable reform the prison system?

One of the reasons prisons aredangerous places is the that socity is complicit with rapists and other sociopaths, giving them tacit approval to brutalize other prisoners.

> You seem to be asserting that there is little practical difference between a life sentence and a death sentence in terms of opportunities to right an unjust conviction. Can you support that with evidence?

Actually, I asserted that there is a difference, namely that if you're sentenced to death, lots of money will be spent after conviction on your case, both govt money and pro-bono. (The former is statutory.) If you're get a sentence of life without parole, there's no govt money and typically no private money either.

Do you really want to argue that point?

Folks on death row are not subject to violence from other inmates, so their only real risk is execution.

As to why prisons are violent, it doesn't actually matter. You're willing to use them, knowing that they're deadly.

Sorry for the late reply. Didn't notice your response.

Well yes, I don't really support prison either. But to me as bad as prison is, it's still the lesser of two evils. I feel that society needs to make up its mind whether prison is punishment or rehabilitation. Currently things seem quite grey on this point. Perhaps certain institutions could be defined more clearly either as rehabilitation institutions or punishment institutions, and criminals could be sent to one or the other based on their history or something.

In any case, putting myself in the position of being someone falsely accused of say, murder. Would I be happy to be going to jail with the possibility of being raped or killed myself? Fuck no. But would the idea of being on death row with the ostensible possibility of a "reasonable review" make me feel better? I guess that's one of those things that's hard to judge in the hypothetical, but from this vantage point, I'd have to say no.

If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised but do you actually have citations for this?

But overall I guess I don't really get what your actual argument is here? Death sentence better than life sentence because prison is so dangerous? Is that it?

Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of million. You can house a criminal for quite a long time before that money's spent.

Further, the current version of incarceration has been shown to not help rehabilitate, yes. I totally give you that. But the current version of incarceration was never designed to rehabilitate. It was designed to securely lock people away for a long time, and that's about it. In pursuit of that goal, we've turned our prisons into a very scary place that (IMHO) does more harm than good.

This isn't to say that every version of incarceration has to be evil in that same way. What if prisons were run with the specific incentive to rehabilitate people at all costs? This really hasn't been tried except in some very limited circumstances, though largely because it's political suicide. Sure, it may very well be the best thing long-term to spend a lot of time and money making criminals stop being criminal, but try explaining this to the father who saw his daughter raped by that animal while on national TV with him while you're running for president.

Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc.

I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.

I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone.

It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.

If they didn't mean that killing someone costs a lot of money then they should not have said it. :)

I was simply pointing out that killing can be be done pretty quickly and cheaply -- as cheap and quick as we as a society want. The same goes for whether and how imprisonment is carried out. As with many things in life, there are dials. We can adjust these dials.

I understand your view. The situation makes me sad, and angry, all around. And I'm not talking about just this case.

I have adopted a "we are homo sapien" (note: not plural) outlook toward humanism. Ideally, for me, we can let these guys live while we slowly improve our civilized society to a point where the niche that conditions these criminals can absolutely no longer function.

They slowly die out and we have no blood on our hands. I think we're still primitive, though. I acknowledge that I am very lofty and this issue is very complicated. I would just really not like to have anything to do with death.

I have adopted a "we are homosapien" (note: not plural) outlook towards the humanities

While I have no idea what that means, I would like to point out that "homo sapien" is not the singular of "homo sapiens"

I'm really racking my brain here thinking of a way to fix my sentence.

What I'm saying is that our human power and dignity does not come from the individual but the whole species. Like a colony of ants. A sort of species mind. It is the intelligence that exists in the cloud of connections between humans.

Not self aware intelligence, but an intelligence that expresses itself in culture and societies. I am basically saying that we are all of the same branch of that four dimensional tree called evolution. I believe that this oneness mindset is healthier.

If you ever wondered what an off topic comment looks like, there you have it :)

I get where you're coming from, and I would love to live in the utopia you're describing. But unfortunately I don't think that it is likely to happen any time soon...

In cases like this you can pretty much count on a 'life without parole' sentence though.

I'd say 60 pitiful years in a federal penitentiary is far more cruel than a death sentence.

I definitely agree that it's more cruel. Also, the person being in prison doesn't guarantee that they're not going to commit any more crimes, it just guarantees that those crimes are going to be against either other inmates or prison staff.

Personally I think that in cases of super-long jail time they may as well just change it to a capital sentence.

Super-long jail time is a death sentence. It's execution by incarceration.

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