When a result of "moral action" is torture..

Perhaps holding him in the kind of confinement he is held...is "using him."

Never too many object lessons!

in an ideal world everybody would have their own ''use'' that would help society, but this world is far from ideal.

It is far from rational too.

They used to have prisoners make license plates, work on chain gangs, or stuff like that. Why isn't that done any more? Hard labor was once considered part of the punishment and was probably more of a deterrent than laying around all day watching TV and getting free meals, clothes and medical care. Perhaps inmates could volunteer for drug testing in order to "pay their debt to society."

The person I had in mind when making this thread could never have worked on a chain gang. He'd just smash those chained to him, not even meaning to do it. As long as his hands, feet or teeth are free he is a danger to everyone.

Prison should be a short-term punishment only. A person should only be sentenced to prison if it is thought that the person may become safe for society sometime in the near future to be released again. If there is no intent to release the person within some reasonable amount of years, there is no point in putting them into the prison at all -- they should just be executed, or kept as a slave. To put them in prison, and then not use them for work, is just hypocritical because it is really just an expensive and ineffectual form of torture.

hypocritical is the word. It is immoral to kill, and it is immoral to put peace loving citizens in harms way. So society is crippled by these two moralistic considerations and doesn't fit the description of a reasonable society.

Like the two young men who raped and killed two nine year old girls here in Norway a few years ago.

During the trial they showed no remorse and no understanding that they'd done anything wrong. They were so ill and so dangerous that they would have to be contained for the rest of their lives.
They are useless to society, a burden. The reasonable choice would be to do away with them if you ask me. It may sound harsh, but to my mind, keeping them confined for several decades, taking away everything but the heat in their bodies, is worse.

From a cynical point of view, you'll probably find that government opposition to death sentences come from a number of causes :

1. Political fallout (from people against capital punishment)
2. It costs about $50k per year to imprison someone,
3. Prisoners in many places do work producing number plates etc, so they offset their cost to incarcerate through production. So their real yearly incarceration cost is much lower than $50k
4. It costs about $1,000,000 to execute them

And just how do you force someone to do hard labour? In the old day it was through the use of whips etc. These days that's not politically possible.

What is the price of one bullet? Or a rope?

But hanging or shooting people would be inhumane and evil.

Either that or society is hypocritical and indecisive, but I can't remember which.

A bullet in the back of the head of an unsuspecting person. That's not inhumane. He'll never know what hit him.

If it truly is an individual that is guaranteed to cause pain and suffering to others if he is not kept in restrains or isolated at all times I am of the opinion that it would be more humane to take his life than keep him in a cage and wait until he dies of natural causes. That is a half measure, and one could argue that it is cowardly of a society not to take the consequences of it's actions, and instead taking it out on individuals. It is certainly not rational.

Hannibal Lecter, in the film I quoted from in the initial post made another remark in that monologue I quoted. "We live in primitive times. Society is neither savage nor civilized...."

I was just playing devil's advocate.


Which is worse, death or torture?


I society to blame?

Well, seems my figures were a bit off. It seems the price of one bullet or a rope in california is $250,000,000

Just type in cost death sentence to Google, and there's many sites giving similar figures. They break down the costs of how they came up with those figures too.

http://www.deathpenalty.org/index.php?pid=cost&menu=1%22

Like I said, people want to kill people for their crimes, but they want to do it in a "humane" way- which apparently isn't all that cost efficient. We could just throw them off a cliff; that would be free.

Foley makes my point.

There's nothing humane about sticking someone in a cell for ten years, taking away everything, telling them that at the end of their ten-year wait they are going to be put down.

But wait, they have the option to plea for a pardon, and if it's granted they will be allowed to sit in that cell until they die from natural causes.

If the evidence is conclusive and irrefutable, if the crime merits the death penalty (in the places where this is practiced) they should just be executed right away. This is not advocating the death penalty, just saying that if they are going to do it anyway, then why not get it over with.

Quasi humane indecision is sickening.

I think the problem with society now is that everyone has to pay because others commit crimes. We lock people up for X number of years and feed them and cloth them and bed them. We give them stuff to do. What kind of punishment is that? All that does is make the people who have to pay for them to be put away commit crimes as well. As cold as it sounds, harsher punishment is required for something to be learned (or gained). In my opinion, the English had it right when they were just putting prisoners in Australia. Why not just take the prisoners, put them somewhere, and let them live their lives away from the rest of society. They'll learn quickly enough why society has rules such as the ones that made them prisoners to begin with.

Yeah. Just look at australia. They became civilized enough didn't they