magerette
Hedgewitch
- Joined
- October 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834
I've never really bought into the whole "prison is suffering" thing. Never been, and don't plan on going, so I'm admittedly talking out my keister, but I just don't see it. The only way that works is if you've got genuine remorse, and I've yet to see that out of someone that gets a 100+ year sentence. The decision for me is based solely on efficiency. If we get past taking 20 years dicking around in these death penalty cases and economize a bit (bullets are cheap), it's cheaper to put them down than to support them for decades, not to mention the elimination of the need to build lifetime warehouses for them.
As always dte, your reasoning is a weird combination of hard-nosed realism and some kind of mutated semi-romantic idealism. There's almost hope for you.
It really has absolutely nothing to do with remorse. The suffering comes from being deprived of your whole life and getting a new one that totally sucks and that you can't change. Every day you think about what you could have been doing/enjoying/etc if you hadn't screwed up. You have incredible anger and self-recrimination, even if you're too sociopathic to feel guilt or remorse.
As far as bang for your buck goes, you are doing more pain and damage to the scumbags by keeping them alive, as can be seen by the many who off themselves in a suicide by cop or something rather than go back to the joint.
Edit: So in a way, the death penalty is a better and more merciful option, and as you point out, maybe cheaper, though after all the litigation most people take on to get out of it, I don't know if we actually save money on those who have been executed.
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834