Originally Posted by alexander224 Another to solve the prison system would to loosen up the laws, so there are less people in prison, minus all the killing, Inb4stfuhippy. Make drug laws looser. I saw some statistic, something 50% of prisoners are drug charges and more than half of the drug charges are just possession. So that could help fix the prison system without the killing.

Originally Posted by Nightside Eclipse And half the innocent people will become criminals after they exit jail anyways, so it just adds more criminals to our world.

Originally Posted by nshanin No. The state shouldn't have the right to kill its citizens, that's not part of the social contract. There's also the chance to kill innocents. One innocent life isn't worth even a million dollars.

Originally Posted by nshanin Who would Jesus execute?

Originally Posted by Impetus Exokate Perhaps employing a strategy of rehabilitation and reintegration of criminals into society would work better than simply acting in a punitive manner, or by harshly punishing the criminals in a desperate bid to deter others.

Originally Posted by Death Insurance Murdering another person isn't part of the social contract either, is it?

Not to sound Fascist

but for the safety of the state of the union, wouldn't this be acceptable to kill the truly-dangerous criminals? If a mass murderer kills fifty people, why should he be allowed to live?

The fact that he's wasting our tax dollars, YOUR tax dollars, is a crime in itself.

Jews.

Originally Posted by JustAnotherAsshole That's invalid. If the people weren't in prison to begin with, we wouldn't have that problem.

Originally Posted by Nightside Eclipse I know... that was technically my point... The less innocent people to go to jail, the less screwed up people we have coming.

Originally Posted by JustAnotherAsshole Well then, forgive me, kind sir. My slightly inebriated self pays less attention and has less patience, and therefor didn't read your entire response. Take this as compensation. *Hands you instant pork wonton soup*

I sometimes think that the biggest difference between Britan and America was the enlightenment period.

I mean, as Vince says, we got the same shit over here as you got over there, but it's the little differences. And I think the biggest and most striking of the little differences have their roots in that brief burst of philosophy, where England sat around for a few decades thinking about it's actions, while America was busy killing Indians or enslaving blacks.

For example, our legal system. It's heavily moulded by Mill's 'On Liberty', and I think is far superior to the American legal system. It really is far more centred around letting the guilty go free rather than imprison the innocent. I have seen loads of silly courtroom news stories from the U.S. about people getting imprisoned for really non-utilitarian things, like burning a flag. I'd like to think that would NEVER happen in England. We have stupid stories of judges making weird decisions that piss people off too of course, but far more often the stories are about the judge letting a man go unreasonably, rather than imprisoning him unreasonably, which is a big fucking difference.

England is world renowned for it's 'soft' legal system. What an Englishman may get for murder is what many other countries charge for drug charges, and of course, there is no capital punishment. (We are not though, overrun with crime, and I would assume have lower crime rates than America.) I'd like to think that this softness is actual a symptom of the system being just. It means that there is far more room for reasonable doubt, and so they must be more concerned with avoiding false imprisonment.

There is plenty of other stuff from the Enlightenment too. Such as England's tenancy to be almost fully atheist. An interviewer over here, Jeremy Paxman, was trying to embarrass Tony Blair, asking him if he prayed like George W Bush with his government, or if he prayed with Bush, and he laughed a little and said "of course not". In contrast I hear Bush prays every morning, and God advises him, and so on.

Then of course you have another great figure of the period, Darwin, which explains itself. Evolution is fact here, not 'theory'.

I mean, they are relativly small things that have worked their way into the English psyche, and not the American one. I'm not saying it's a perfect country, or even a better one, I just mean that we had a small period of being philosophiclly brilliant, and it has made us a bit more sensible and thoughtful in matters of philosophy, such as empiricism, logic and justice.

Anyway, so maybe it's John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham running through my veins, but I can't sympathise with capital punishment. It seems barbaric and regretable, and fails many many ethical tests. The legal system needs to be built on letting ahundred guilty men go rather than imprisoning an innocent one. Capital punishment cannot then work. An doing so as the OP said, to save money, raises even more problems.

If you want to be a moron about it, shake your fist and nod your big meat filled head while drooling "lock em up, fucking murderers an rapists n fuckin bastards! kill em! kill em all! Let em byrn!" but when it comes to a true ethical reflection on the actions of the state, the people you are killing are not murderers and rapists, but people. Who here has not been a criminal at some point? and were you not still a man? Did you deserve to be treated as a criminal, rather than a man? Would it have been just?

Originally Posted by nshanin Which is why you should be contained, rather than killed if you violate it. The social contract was made to keep individuals away from the violence of nature, if you go from the frying pan into the fire, then the contract becomes some kind of sick joke.

Because he's human?

He can go ahead and waste them, he deserves to live nonetheless. The elderly, the poor, and the unemployed are all wasting your tax dollars; does that mean we should kill them? No, that would just eliminate the lower cast temporarily before more people move down in it and the cycle starts over again. Sorry. And besides, most of the time the court process takes longer than putting the people in prison for life anyway.

Just think, what did the victim do to deserve being murdered? Nothing. So, how can we let someone who killed an innocent person live? They did something arbitrary to a person who, for all we know, was a completely law-abiding citizen. What benefit, then, was there that that citizen abided by the law if they could get murdered, and their murderer not get fully punished for his crime? We need to set a boundary, a line of logic as far as crime and punishment are concerned. The punishment MUST equal the crime. In prison prisoners eat regular (some homeless people go hungry, and some children), they get TV and haircuts (some homeless people don't get either of those), various other media like reading material and Internet, and they can even get married from inside the prison. Is this a deserving place to put a person who has killed another? The only difference is four walls. They are still alive, still living, and live better than some free people.

Originally Posted by Impetus Exokate Perhaps employing a strategy of rehabilitation and reintegration of criminals into society would work better than simply acting in a punitive manner, or by harshly punishing the criminals in a desperate bid to deter others. Fact is, we've been punishing and deterring for hundreds of years, and crime hasn't been eliminated yet. Time for a different approach perhaps? Oh, and your country should stop locking people up just because they choose to possess / use / sell / grow / manufacture drugs.

Originally Posted by JustAnotherAsshole "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"

Originally Posted by The Last MentleGam I feel that our justice system lets people off too easily. Rape and murder should get you a bullet in the head the instant you are convicted. No point in a bunch of appeals when there is like a 1% error rate. The rest of the people in prison should be given business lessons and if they can't get back on their feet and they end up back again, then they should be killed. I don't understand why taxes should go to funding a military or prisons.

Originally Posted by Mantikore if it costs so much in maintaining prisons, would it be a good idea to just cut a lot of services that prisons provide? that is, fuck things like recreation, TV and other shit like that where some law abiding people in poverty cant even provide for themselves and packing more people into prisons, and building large, centralised prisons to optimise manpower and resources

Originally Posted by Death Insurance That'd be a good secondary idea, except what with all the human rights activists today, it'd probably just be better to kill all those degenerate prisoners who would otherwise complain about the quality of the prisons, get noticed by the activists who protest, and get his prison-perks back.

Originally Posted by danzig there ought be one law. do as you will, so long as you harm no one.

Originally Posted by danzig i will bet you 2 million dollars, and you can cut me off from all human contact for 15 years, so long as i have any book i desire, paper and utensils, and i will last the whole time.

Originally Posted by nshanin You know what happens when you do that? You end up like the guy they interview here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...BJOerAPG7aDACA Anterograde amnesia, and various other mental disorders. Solitary is not something I'd place my worst enemy under; it doesn't get much worse than solitary. Maybe torture, but that's about it.

Originally Posted by Zay I'm sure something can be arranged so that they communicate with SOMEONE, but not other criminals. Maybe people trained in reforming them, or only talking to other criminals that have been qualified as non criminally minded/inclined.

Originally Posted by Death Insurance So you've probably heard the statistics: more than 1% of Americans are in prison, it costs $66 billion dollars a year to maintain the prisons, which is $88 per person per day. Obviously there's a problem with the prison system. Do you believe in capital punishment? If so, do you believe we should enforce it more? It seems like the right choice to me. What with the rapists, sex offenders, mass murderers, and otherwise dangerous people in the world, it seems like the right thing to do. The $86.08 of potassium chloride needed for execution is a much better financial investment than letting someone sit in a cell for the rest of their life, living off the government's money - our tax dollars. Then there's the chance that they get parole or break out of prison, thus probably returning to their old habits. Otherwise, a bullet only costs a few cents. So if I was in charge of the prison system, I'd enforce the death penalty to a near-totalitarian level. A criminal sentenced to two years of prison time, by today's standards, would just be euthanized. Not only would that save us billions of dollars, that would intimidate other criminals to not do the things they do. Thus, crime would hypothetically go down. Altogether, the country could be a better place. What would you do?

Originally Posted by alexander224 But will you be sane when you leave?

Originally Posted by danzig yes..

Originally Posted by alexander224 nu-huh.

Originally Posted by danzig got 2 million?

Originally Posted by alexander224 2 million internets.

Originally Posted by danzig i will bet you 2 million dollars, and you can cut me off from all human contact for 15 years, so long as i have any book i desire, paper and utensils, and i will last the whole time.

Originally Posted by danzig well, you aren't a russian banker any way, it wouldn't work.