-cough- -cough- @Blurry_Buildings @noname223 @derpyderpins
Nice to be pinged!
With this topic I like to start with the purpose of arresting people and giving them sentences, from community service up to death. Different people will feel differently but I see it as basically being in three categories:
- "Justice." And I think it's important here to think through what that means. I don't think the primary purpose is revenge or an eye for an eye, although that reasoning would fall into this category. I tend to favor "two wrongs don't make a right" as a philosophy. But this is justice in the sense of supporting the victims of crimes and society at large. When you see victims in court, broken and in pain because their loved one was killed, a big theme is 'they didn't do anything wrong, why did this happen?' I know the difference here is nuanced, but it's about telling those people "you are right, and we as a society value that you live respectably, and so while there's no good way to make it better, we will make this visible, more-than-words statement about how wrong the criminal's behavior was."
- "Safety." Here I put two sub-categories: deterrence and getting dangerous people off of the streets.
- "Rehabilitation." Self-explanatory, but we want people to "do the time" and learn a lesson and then go live a happy Disney comeback arc.
Almost everyone's answer to "why do we arrest people and throw them in jail" falls partially into these categories, and I think that it's normally a percentage person by person (eg 30% justice, 50% safety, 20% rehabilitation.) That means that when looking at a policy like the death penalty we should consider all three.
Skipping Justice, I would argue that the death penalty serves little to no purpose for the other two categories. Rehabilitation is self-explanatory, can't rehabilitate if you're dead, so it's a negative to people who value that, but Safety is more nuanced. Theoretically a dead person definitely can't harm anyone else, and the threat of death should be a deterrent. I'm not convinced either of these mean anything.
First, a dead person and someone serving a life sentence are just about the same amount of threat to society. This isn't Batman where the joker breaks out of Arkham and returns to his evil headquarters to immediately start doing more crimes.
Second, I don't think the increased threat changes the equation as far as deterrence. The reason being that the type of people capable of committing crimes that would make this discussion come up are not really able to consider consequences anyway. Their minds work completely differently than yours and mine. They aren't thinking 'hmmm. . . I want to kill all these people . . . I guess I'll do it if I only have to go to prison but not if I'll get the death penalty. . . ' They aren't considering that at all. That's not to say deterrence never works at all, moreso the threat is that the cops will arrest you and bad stuff will happen to you, with little thought spared to what those end consequence will be.
I say then that the death penalty is a negative for rehabilitation and doesn't significantly move the needle on safety.
So that leaves us with Justice. Obviously on this website, the appropriate thing here is to joke about death being better than life in prison (which I actually believe is true.) The question comes down to that symbolic, futile gesture I described above, showing that we know it doesn't make things right but we are doing
something drastic to convey the message of how awful the acts are.
I was about to say that I don't have too strong of an opinion on this, but then I remembered what is coming out in the Epstein emails. If I were in charge, human traffickers and people who harm children - especially powerful people who think they are untouchable - would be hanged and then have their head put on a pike over the town square just for the message. But, I'm okay with arguments in either direction based on the above analysis.
