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.

I also think prisoners should be treated humanely, and wonder why people think if we treat criminals like animals they will stop behaving like animals.

I personally think that the cruelty is outweighed by the possibility of an innocent prisoner getting exonerated.