A) Kill them - The current choice. It's disfavored because it's final and we've made plenty of mistakes after doing it enough times. Also, it's more expensive than (B) because we try harder to make sure we've got the right person.
B) Life in prison - Possibly a compromise option, but there are some who say this is equivalent to (A), or possibly even worse. Prison itself is rather detrimental to people, after all.
C) Free them after some time. This is great for lesser crimes (which probably shouldn't result in prison to begin with). But for major ones, we're no longer protecting the rest of society from the murderers and rapists we have locked up. We hope they've been reformed, but prison really doesn't do that very well.
And what do we do with the prisoners who have no reasonable prospects of life on the outside any more? You can expunge a criminal record, sure, but you can't make up for 20+ years in prison and a lack of marketable job skills overnight.
It would be good if we had better avenues for reform.
The solution is really simple in principle but also really difficult in practice. Treat everyone as an individual, case by case. Use prison as a place for reform and rehabilitation, not punishment. Provide the resources, programs and incentive to help them reform. Prison should not be separate from society, but merely limit the freedoms they have abused (ie.for violent offenders remove the freedom to assault; for organised crime the freedom to associate) until they have proven their willingness to reform and that they no longer pose a threat.
But now you have three problems, doing this is really expensive, really difficult to judge when rehabilitation is sufficient, and really, really hard to put fair and just limits around continued incarceration. Mind you, the current system has all these problems anyway.
"Do you advocate prison as a place of solely rehabilitation because you're putting yourself and the people that you know in that hypothetical situation?"
no. i have met these people, i agree it is difficult.. and my partner works as a psych for kids effected by family violence and abuse. the stories i have heard from her.. makes me want to castrate those fuckers with a rusty knife. but that doesn't fix anything for anyone.
problem is, you would think for prisoners rehabilitation is easy and punishment is hard. it is the other way around. there was a small long term counselling program running in my state for rehabilitation in prisons. it was massively successful in reducing recidivism, but nearly every prisoner subjected to it said they hated it and would prefer to have a longer sentence. it was cut by the previous right wing government, and now recidivism (and private ownership of prisons) is up.
rehabilitation works. punishment decreases the incentive to reintegrate with society. and if the prisoner resists—and this was the part i was alluding to in my previous post—it is their responsibility and continued deprivation of liberties is required, until they serve out their life or reform.
Because really, the kind of extravagant violence to justify a death penalty is the kind that makes you want to do several things:
1. Not pay for their livelihood for the rest of their life. US prisoners cost somewhere in the ballpark of $150k a year to house, feed, etc. What a colossal waste of resources. 2. Not kill them, because thats barbaric and primitive. We are better than that. It even costs more to execute people than it does to imprison them forever, since the appeals and actual execution will run to the tune of millions.
So kicking them out of the club we call society seems like a the best option in my view.
The problem is, one, having somewhere to put them (I'm sure Australia would not be as much of a fan of having serial murderers dumped on their shores as they were two centuries ago) and two, keeping them out. But really, it seems to be like the moral / ethical maxima. If you break the most fundamental rules of society, to such a degree you are unfit to ever participate again, you are kicked out.
Build artificial island somewhere and drop them there.
Edit: The moon also is a harsh mistress.
you are talking about the british, right?
It's also disfavored by many people because there are moral objections to state-sanctioned murder. For example, I don't believe it is acceptable to take life of anyone who doesn't pose a serious immediate threat.
In other words, we'll end up letting these people go free to find more victims:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Williams