an interesting piece for consideration; i’m generally of the mind that this is correct, but there are some people who simply need to be imprisoned for life. to its credit this article does mention it here:
Of course, some offenders may have to stay locked up for life because they remain dangerous. How to assess and manage their sentences is an important question I will ignore here. But such cases account for a very small fraction of the nearly quarter of a million people incarcerated for life in the US today.
but i think it downplays the necessity of doing this, in spite of the few cases it does apply to. i think it’s probably fine to sentence your anders breiviks and jeffrey dahmers to life imprisonment and keep them there, for example, because it is very unlikely that they’ll be rehabilitated even in the best prison system conceivable.
I think that life imprisonment can be validly argued, but I don’t agree with your argument.
If we agree that someone is (effectively) beyond hope of rehabilitation and dangerous to society, then I would say at that point, life imprisonment is merely torture with the risk of escape. They are serving no purpose to society, just being isolated for longer than a person can live. Capital punishment becomes the more humane option, still serves as a deterrent, far reduces the amount of resources (people, money, etc.) that would otherwise be needed to feed, care for and secure the dangerous person, and prevents the risk of escape or violence within the prison. I’m a little surprised at how rarely and tangentially the author mentioned the death penalty due to its close connection to what is essentially just a slower passive version of it: whether they were in favour or against it, it would have been insightful to contrast.
However, my biggest hesitancy with capital punishment is that there have been cases where imprisoned people are found to be innocent after a long time, even decades.
(As a slightly-related side note, the current normal prison system as seen in most of the world is horrible and tends to make rehabilitation harder, by alienating inmates from society and exposing them to a highly toxic environment. What do they expect to happen once you remove someone’s normal social connections and their means of self-sufficiency like employment? Once they’re out, turning to criminal acts is probably a far more productive way to live than it was before, plus now they might have more criminal social connections to work with)
