Why do some people prefer life in prison over a death sentence?
Have you ever wondered why prisoners who commit heinous crimes are kept alive in overcrowded prisons instead of being executed?
#LifeInPrison vs #DeathSentence #PrisonOvercrowding #Incarceration #SeriousCrimes #JudicialSystem
There’s lots to be said about how prison should rehabilitate and if it works even people with life sentences will eventually get released. Even ignoring tha though, if someone is wrongfully convicted you can release them, you can’t resurrect them
The risk you got the wrong guy for one.
So, just to be clear here, you argument is, “There are too many prisoners. We need to kill some.” ?
Because we don’t have a perfect system and people have been proven innocent during their sentence. You can’t undo that when killing someone.
What do you think an acceptable error rate with the death penalty should be?
Prison keeps innocent people safe, and it punishes criminals by depriving them of their freedom. Killing them won’t achieve anything that prison doesn’t already achieve. All it does is appeal to our barbaric desire for revenge. I do not want the justice system to appeal to that desire. The justice system is for dispensing justice, and justice and revenge are not the same thing.
There is a lot of prisons where the prisoners are working and making products or fighting fires, etc. Not that that’s um… well they aren’t getting paid min wage, so that’s motivation to incarcerate more people.
Killing them costs more. All the court cases and appeals needed to secure a death penalty is expensive, very expensive.
Not really keen on giving goverment the power to kill people when we know our police aren’t super trustworthy.
Far too many innocent people have lost their life to the death penalty so far.Â
1. It’s cheaper for the taxpayers. The appeals process is lengthy and expensive, way more than the cost of just housing and feeding them for the rest of their life.
2. A belief that a corrupt government shouldn’t have the power of life and death, especially when it’s so unevenly applied among race and class.
3. The idea that someone gets off easy by dying instead of spending the rest of their life like a caged animal who has to suffer every day for what they did, which is a much longer punishment.
4. We know for a fact that innocent people get convicted all of the time. If they’re in jail, there’s always a chance to right that wrong. But if you execute an innocent person, there’s no chance of that. You can clear their name and exonerate them, but it doesn’t matter. An innocent person is still dead, and it’s not worth killing them all in hopes that they’re mostly guilty.
Those are the most comment arguments that I’ve heard.
Rationally, I support abolishing it. But if they want to take someone like Chris Watts out into a field and put him down like an animal, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
It’s not that I think that life in prison is necessarily “better.” My argument is simple. I think it is wrong to kill people outside of maybe assisted suicide or self defense. So for me, none of the arguments for or against the death penalty are relevant outside of whether it is ok to kill people.
I fundamentally do not believe that death is an acceptable punishment for a crime. Some crimes maybe deserve it, but it is not right that we carry it out when there is an alternative.
I think the death penalty should only be reserved for the absolute scum of the earth and we know for a fact that he/she did the crime
Because prisoners aren’t all killing themselves lol
There have been too many instances of putting the wrong person to death. At least if they get life in prison they have a hope of getting out and having their name cleared someday. They have a *hope* of returning to a normal life with a big cash payout. Of course the government can never really pay someone back for stealing years from them, but it’s better than putting them to death.
We can’t make any system perfect, there will always be people that get put away that shouldn’t have been. It might be 1 in 10,000 but it happens. (It’s not, it’s more like 1 in 50.) And when it does, we try to fix that. But you can never “unkill” someone. So if you wrongfully convict someone, sentence them to death, then 5 years later find out that your airtight case against them relied on falsified evidence, well… too late now.
You’re going straight to economy when it comes to people’s lives?
As a prisoner would you rather get killed than be in prison?
Because you can’t take back executing someone, and our justice system convicts and even [executes innocent people](https://innocenceproject.org/) in startling numbers.
Prison is a worst punishment than death for most.
The issue with the death penalty isn’t just a moral one.
For starters, as others have said, it costs more to put someone on death row. There’s a huge amount of legal hoops you have to jump thru to put someone on death row, and all of that includes paying lawyers and others.
Furthermore, there’s the potential for sentencing an innocent to death, these legal battles are long and the likelyhood that the accused is coerced into giving a false confession or being increasingly confused only goes up, you can imagine there are corrupt officials out there who will force a false confession in order to shorten (and thus save money) the legal process.
On top of all of that, there’s the risk of suffering during the actual execution process if done poorly, and not many qualified people are willing to do those executions.
Most people prefer being alive to being dead. A lot of people have ethical concerns about killing people. If somebody is wrongfully convicted, there is a possibility of letting them out of prison, but they cannot be brought back to life.
4% of people on death row are innocent. I’d rather feed and house 1000 heinous murderers than execute one innocent man.
The better question is why are we sanctioning the killing of people?
Why do you think Courts are never wrong?
Or are you willing to murder a few innocent people to save a few $’s?
If you’re truly trying to punish someone, then they aught to exist in a boring yet threatening (because of other inmates) environment for the rest of their lives. It’s as humane as you can possibly be to those who’ve committed horrible acts, and leaves room for exoneration for those who were falsely sentenced.
If you kill a prisoner, you’re literally setting them free from punishment and cutting their sentence short.
I don’t trust the government to decide who deserves to live and die. For every heinous crime someone may decide is ok to kill over, there is someone angling to twist the definition to include minorities or people they don’t like so they can kill them.
For instance, many people may think that people who sexually assault minors should die and that the death penalty is just for the crime. However you feel about this, there are already people trying to define being trans as being sexually explicit and could angle that anyone who is visibly trans near a child is someone committing sexual assault to a child.
This is only a modern example but the same thing happened with the war on drugs to black people and protesters of Vietnam. We have records of Nixon targeting these groups.
> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities” – John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Domestic Policy Chief, 1994
Luckily the death penalty wasn’t on the table for this crime but many many people still died because of the Nixons administrations purposeful targeting of these groups. I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if they decided possession or distribution was bad enough for the death penalty.
I would be totally okay with the death sentence, except for the fact that the justice system gets it wrong sometimes.
You can let an innocent man out of prison. You can’t un-execute an innocent man you’ve put to death.
Death is easy. Prison is hard. Let those who commit atrocities suffer long days.
Because those people are free and fear death
Life in prison, then let the person have the option to work a minimum wage job with 100% of the proceeds going to the victims or victims families. Give the person a chance to at least somewhat redeem themselves.
The person who is put to death experiences no punishment whatsoever after the moment of execution. For those who subscribe to the view that criminals should be punished first and rehabilitated second, a life spent confined to a small room with one hour per day outside is *surely* much more effective than a (theoretically) quick death.
Some people argue that the death penalty is intended as a deterrent (hence why executions used to be public), but it’s demonstrably not a particularly effective one.
Prison overcrowding is not due to a high number of life imprisonments. It’s due to a large number of imprisonments for non-violent crimes.
3 free and a cot
It is because the death sentence kills you
We know that there are innocent people in prison. Though different places have different percentages on how many there are, the fact remains that they exist. Placing someone on death row is made difficult for that reason, and actually executing someone can take years, even decades until all their appeals are exhausted – and even then innocent people have been killed. If we’re going to have the death penalty (something I disagree with personally) it’s far better for us as a society to make it near impossible to kill an innocent person.
Aside from that, if we turn ourselves into a society that kills people on practical grounds like “it makes more space” then we’ve fallen down a hole of depravity and societal collapse that we’ll never be able to pull ourselves out of. We need extraordinary reasons to take an extraordinary measure like allowing the government to kill its citizens. Simply wanting more space is the absolute worst justification for a death sentence.
The death penalty is wrong, full stop. The state should not have the power to deprive another person of their life.
As an atheist who doesn’t believe in an after life and that it’s just lights out after death, I feel like getting executed is just a way to get out of punishment… sure that person is dead and that’s a major consequence for their actions but if the person spends 45 years in prison with no hope of ever being free, to me that’s better justice served because everyday that person wakes up he’s going to be reminded of everything they are missing in the world…
I mean I don’t want criminals in our society but I don’t wish death on a lot of people. Mainly pedos they can get the death sentence. But past that it’s kinda hard to actively want someone to die.
Death is permanent and irreversible and should not be placed upon anyone forcefully.
For me, there’s no utilitarian argument about whether they can reform. It isn’t about whether or not they can still be productive in society behind bars. It’s an ethical judgement. We should not kill people.
When I think about being dead, I am terrified. And I realize that I would like to be alive, no matter what I’ve done. And the only way to hold that belief is to also afford others the same luxury.
It’s actually very expensive to execute someone especially if you use lethal injection
prison living from my understanding isn’t all that bad depending on the prison. you still get meals a place to sleep, work, recreation time etc.
Because death is final. There is no chance at redemption, there is no woops we got the wrong guy etc. Also, sometimes releasing someone from their burden to society can be seen as too leniant for some crimes. etc.
The death sentence is a mercy.
Decades behind grey walls knowing nothing will ever change, you will never have freedom, and then you’re going to die anyway gives you plenty of time to suffer.
Death isnt punishment, deprivation of liberty is
Because the state should not have the right to take your life away.
I don’t trust our criminal justice system to execute the right people. A single innocent person executed is unforgivable.