Quote:
Originally posted by Lady Sidhe
The odds of an innocent person actually being executed are low. Why? Because they're more likely to spend the rest of their lives in prison, due to endless appeals. Besides, the odds of the death penalty being sought nowadays is getting lower and lower. You practically have to rape and kill a busload of teenage nuns in front of a cop and ten other witnesses, then say "I DID IT!" before they'll call for the death penalty. And all this comes from the social work crowd who blame everyone and everything for the criminal's behavior EXCEPT the criminal himself.
"Lock the fuckers up and make them break rocks for the next 20 years, they don't have the opportunity to reoffends and if they are innocent, they can still get out. Make prisons factories, reduce the cost to the taxpayer, it seems to me that prisons need to be both more human and less generous."
We can't do that. Breaking rocks is cruel and unusual punishment, and the second one is exploitation.
"Life in prison means just that. Life. Gone are the days of getting out in 7 years."
Wrong. A "life" sentence is seven years, give or take, before the individual comes up for parole. What you're thinking of is "life without possibility of parole," which is rarely handed down.
Sidhe
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In 2000, the Govenor of Illinois put a moratorium on all executions due to alarming revelations about the number of prisoners on death row in Illinois who were later found to be innocent.
Imposing the death sentence costs the tax payers thousands if not millions of dollars because of the lengthy appeals process involved which has to be done by law. You note this lengthy appeals process yourself when speaking of an innocent man, above. The cost of life imprisonment is probably about equivalent of all the costs of the long appeals process.
There is also the suffering of the victim's families to be taken into account. No matter what is done to the murderer, the family's loved one is still dead. When the death sentence is imposed, the families often have to go through 20 years of legal and court maneuvering before they get some kind of closure. LWP gives the families closure and the comfort that the murderer is being punished and will never again be free to comit further atrocities.
Life without parole is becoming a very common sentence. In Oregon the number of such sentences has risen 47%, and the sentence means just what it says - those guys are in for life.
Making prisoners work is not exploitation. Prisoners are commonly assigned productive work in our prison systems today.
Just because I am against the death penalty does not mean I feel sorry for sociopathic killers and want them released back into the population. Killers should be locked up for good.
I don't know where you get the idea that murders get to have their own cable TV. There may or may not be a single TV available in some prison common areas. Such TV's are shared by 100 - 200 inmates and may be watched for limited periods only - often this priviledge is taken away by the guards for discipinary reasons.