If the point of prison for criminals isn't punishment, then what is it?
Obviously there's a lot of vague terms and wiggle room in that paragraph, but there's certainly a purpose to prisons aside from punishment.
Punishment is a barbaric way to look at it. Revenge doesn't mix very well with a legal system. (emotions vs objetive POV)
However during this period of incarceration, prisoners have a right not to be physically and mentally abused by their fellow inmates and jailers. Incarceration is the punishment, not beatings and rapes.
As to the killing of death row prisoners, their punishment involves not just the loss of their liberty, but also their loss of the right to live the remainder of their natural lives. But it does not give the state the right to make participant endure several minutes of deliberate and avoidable excruciating pain whilst being put to death. I'm fairly certain your justice system doesn't codify that kind of barbarism as part of the death sentence.
If The Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland can provide pain free assisted suicides then surely it's possible to kill death row prisoners just as humanely in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Correctional_Instituti...
Are you condoning torture, saying it has a function we should put to good use?
The question then would be if the goal of a justice system should be to hurt people in the most effective way imaginable.
I don't know what you mean by creating a "faux-clinical atmosphere".
Isn't the reason for punishing criminals that they broke some aspect of acceptable social interaction (not hurting others a major one of those aspects) ? Even in the context of the state having the monopoly on the use violence, they should not use violence to the fullest extent possible, if only to prove that some actions are really unacceptable and there is never a reason to sink to the same level of what the criminal did. Criminals may be one-time-offenders or life-long-monsters, they are still humans.
You may call that squeamish, but i don't think torture should have any place in a modern society.
Using torture as a punishment will result in making those convicted of crimes even more dehumanized and depraved. Furthermore, if torture is employed it is a guarantee that wrongfully convicted people will be tortured as well.
Cruelty should not be a tool of a system that is truly just. That is why 'cruel and unusual punishment' is specifically prohibited in the Constitution.