I say lock people up forever and throw away the key if you wish, but do not let the state, which
never has been and never will be perfect, take lives.
From a very pragmatic point of view, if we had a death penalty system that "worked," that is in which there were enough appeals to make sure that the process was just, there would be a good argument for the death penalty purely on pragmatic, economic grounds. It costs on the order, I understand, of $50,000 a year or more to keep a person in a maximum security prison. Take a 25 year old who murders and might have a life expectancy of 50 more years, and you're talking 2.5 million dollars that, IMO, should be spent on productive citizens (as in education) rather than keeping a killer warehoused forever.
To me, if it is certain to an acceptably certain degree, that the person was indeed guilty of a crime sufficiently heinous that they should never be allowed back in society, society has a right to save that money for better uses.
Or, in the alternative, we need to take a chunk of Nevada, or maybe Alaska, fence it in with a secure system, and dump all the lifers into it and say if you don't want to live by the rules of our society, go make a society of your own.
Eminently cheaper and, IMO, quite just. Also, probably a fairly effective deterrent for those cases in which a deterrent would be effective. |
