Denying him any chance to rightfully complain about prison conditions is probably the most effective punishment you can come up with.

When the Baader-Meinhof gang was thrown into inhumane solitary confinement, it and their hunger strikes and suicides made them martyrs to their cause, spawning a new generation of terrorists that picked up their banners.

Meanwhile, Breivik complaining that his PlayStation is too old and that he can't play the newest games makes him a joke figure.

Obviously this doesn't translate to all prisoners, but in cases like Breivik's, the priority is containing his ideology, not punishing the person.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/23157/how-superman-defeated-k...

This seems to have become a standard idea in American TV shows. It's usually something along the lines of a cop threatening a suspect into cooperating..."You wouldn't want to go to jail, a pretty boy like you would be reeeal popular in there."

I've noticed it even in mainstream shows that are otherwise not particularly violent or shocking. I'm pretty sure there was even a line like this in The Simpsons once. These references seem to go unnoticed by the same people who go crazy whenever anyone jokes about female rape.

Now I'm not saying that popular culture is necessarily an accurate reflection of reality, but it's terrifying to imagine that it might be, and even more scary to think that the American public are ok with that.

There isn't a lot that can be done about him though - a more punishing regime isn't going to change him for the better. At least in his cushy little suite he is kept away from the general populous reducing the harm he can do as much as (humanely) possible.

I'm sure he would still hold the same views, maybe even more so if he was made to live in Squallor. It may make people feel better, but I don't know if that is enough.

Also remember that people thought that what we call "white torture" today wasn't torture. Many people today, if you ask them, probably wouldn't think it is torture.

Did they ever think that this also include women prisoners -- and even teen prisoners?

It's a sick, twisted ideology that permits this.

I agree: you don't get my comment.

Note how I never wrote that "an adult male [being] raped is a lesser problem than either a teenager or a female [being] raped". Note also how my comment was an argument against prison rape.

What I alluded to is that most of the people who casually joke about prison rape, would never joke about female rape or teenage rapes.

So, what I meant is that they should consider prison rape under the same light, since it also includes those things -- which is an easier sell to make them see the brutality of the situation, even those that don't particularly care about a murdered being raped, etc.

The sentiment is worded much better that way. The other wording could too easily be interpreted as implying that the rape of men is better than the rape of women and children.

The death penalty can be abused, but there are some clear cases where it is the most reasonable solution. Charlie Manson has been in jail for 45 years; probably Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be kept alive for decades as well.

That's the (small) price society pays because:

> The death penalty can be abused

And history has repeatedly shown that there is no level of evidence that can stop someone being wrongly convicted.

And the death penalty is "the most reasonable solution" in those cases because? It's "too much" to keep people alive?

In that case, maybe don't have a system that gives life sentences with wild abandon -- e.g. for BS "3 strikes offences", etc., and has the biggest incarceration rate in the world by a wide wide wide margin.

Three strikes laws are idiotic, as are most manifestations of the US criminal justice system. I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances, and if you don't think so too, you're a terrible, awful, probably racist bigot.

Society can do much more than we give it credit for. Not all societies hold primitive eye-for-an-eye beliefs or worse.

>I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances

Well, societies that abolished it don't think so. At least their legislators and majority don't. Outliers will always think whatever they want (and grieving relatives of victims and such are the last that should be asked in those matters).

For me the death penalty is not different from things like torture, slavery, judicial rape, etc. Wrong under any circumstances.

Fine, then let's legalize euthanasia. Convicts who really prefer to die could do so. No need to the death penalty.