I'm not generally for death sentence, but I'd honestly change my view if the alternative to death sentence is being locked up in solitary for the rest of your life. Death in this case would be kinder. Best would be that none of those options exists.
I've read plenty of court cases and I'm still of the same opinion. Those people who commit those things are corrupted in some way, and need help. If your point is that they will never get better, the most human thing to do would be to execute them, rather than putting them in solitary. If there is a chance we can "fix" them, then I think we should aim for fixing them.
Solitary confinement is pure torture, I can't even imagine how it would be to spend 20 years under those dreadful circumstances. I generally love lots of things about the US (never been there, I must admit) but I find their incarceration policies scandalous.
So I'm saying this is not caused by some insitutional entity doing something, but rather, by many of them not doing certain things (usually to reduce cost).
My understanding is that some of the reasons might include:
- a privatised prison system - systemic racism - the % of US citizens in prisons being relatively high compared to the rest of what we call developed countries
Obv. all of these are intertwined and it’s a very complex issue.
I’m still struggling to understand how people in an advanced democracy like the US would allow for these things to happen. It seems like it’s considered the norm.
This is beyond fucked up. Arrested as a teenager, they've now spent more time alone in a windowless concrete cell than they did growing up. There's no information on what they did to warrant this, but there's a reason even murder sentences are (usually) less than 10 years in most European countries.