I believe in rehabilitation, but I also believe there are some cases where rehabilitation is a lost cause.
And even when it’s a lost cause, I don’t support the death penalty, make them stay in prison for the rest of their life if need be.
We’re better than this absolute display of retribution.
Personally I feel that forcing someone to live out the rest of their life in a steel and concrete cube with no chance of ever being released is more cruel than executing them but I can see how not everyone would agree with that.
If they’d rather punch their own ticket than stay in prison, we should let them, but our legal system just isn’t reliable enough for the death penalty to be a good idea. You can always let someone out of prison if new evidence exhonerates them, but if you executed them, all you can do is say ‘whoops’
It doesn’t have to be a steel cube.
You can tell how humane a society is by how it treats it’s criminals, and–importantly–how they treat criminals is how they’ll treat their citizens if given half the chance.
Not for no reason does the US lead the western world in state-sponsored brutality and casual administrative cruelty, while northern Europe (who locks their irredeemable criminals away in what Americans derisively refer to as “luxury hotels”) leads the world in happiness quotients.
