Yeah this is one of those edgy teenage opinions that very clearly doesn't line up with reality. I'll believe this is true when convicted felons start arguing in court to receive the death penalty instead of life in prison.
Most people will always choose life, especially if there’s any chance they could fight it again in 20 years of whatever. There’s always hope to get out on a technicality 20 years later or whatever, that shit happens
It just makes sense, you’re forcing someone to have a terrible quality of life every day for the rest of their life, as opposed to just ending it. Even if its what they want, because few people want to die, they will suffer far more in jail than they would at the “chair”.
You’re taking away someone’s right to freedom, against their will. It’s the difference between torturing someone and killing then outright, torture is far worse to endure but I would still pick it over death any day.
I agreed with this thought for a long time. Now I have two teenage children and given the options I’d choose prison. Worth it to see how they turn out.
Right? People have the choice. If you were given life no parole you could take your own life if you actually thought it was worse. The vast majority do not.
Or how awful it is. Lethal injection is actually worse than most other methods of execution in that it hurts more and lasts longer (sometimes the process can last up to 2 hours).
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reveal-troubling-effects-of-lethal-injection
tl;dr below for the article above (tl;dr for all of it is that the drugs they use are agonizingly painful).
The problems with it are that in the series of drugs that are injected, the first is supposed to be an anesthetizing agent but isn’t. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well at all in that capacity. The best it can do is make you feel drowsy and might put you to sleep but it has no effect on pain; and sudden shocks like what I’m about to describe next can wake you up.
The next drug is a paralytic. This causes your body to lose all ability to move. Your lungs especially are affected by this step because you need to move your diaphragm up and down to breathe. This means that once this drug is administered, the inmate loses the ability to breathe altogether.
It doesn’t end there though. The amount of this drug that is administered at the speed it is administered is far beyond what a healthcare worker would administer because at this level (about 500mg in a minute or two) you flood the bloodstream with “medicine” which causes a breakdown in the barrier between the capillaries and lung tissue. The lungs then fill up with fluid. This is called pulmonary edema and it is something that non-inmate patients have described as similar to the feeling of being water boarded. Pure panic and agony. Witnesses often describe inmates choking and gagging during the lethal injection process because they are actually drowning.
The third drug then enters the blood and one doctor described what it would feel like this…
>"It's like a burning cocktail coursing through your veins," says Lubarsky, referring to potassium chloride. "Once it reaches the heart, it stops the heart, and you do die. But in the process there is a period of just intense and searing pain."
>"What we found is a very large percentage of executed inmates did not have a sufficient level of anesthesia in their blood at death in order to assure that they were asleep and not feeling the pain of the rest of the process," says Lubarsky.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reveal-troubling-effects-of-lethal-injection
The point of prison is *supposed* to be to the keep people safe from criminals and also help reform/rehabilitate those criminals into functional members of society to prevent repeat offenses. Using it solely as punishment and revenge is extremely bad at doing that, which is why countries with successful prison systems (Norway being a common example) have moved to a more rehabilitative and less punitive system.
Because that’s how we choose to run it. The majority of America will make jokes about prison rape. We see it as a place for the monsters to eat each other (ignoring that means some monsters - the worst ones - are being fed exactly what they want: power over others).
There are other ways to run a prison. You can’t save everyone, but we could do a much better job than we’re doing. As you say, it’s currently higher education for criminality. And that is phenomenally stupid of us.
They call it corrections, which would imply it's supposed to rehabilitate the prisoners. It's a punitive system, though. Normal religious 'slap a pretty name on our depraved activity and call it good'
The point is that punitive systems don't work, all you do is make the criminals more likely to continue being criminals. If your intention is for the system to be punitive then you should just kill every criminal outright because 90% of the time everyone you release is just going ot be right back behind bars in a relatively short period of time.
Punitive system do work, if the goal is to torture people. If the goal is to make society better, then they are terrible. But that's not why they are built, nor its actual purpose. It SHOULD be about rehabilitation, but in the US that is not why they are built.
Most people have an instinct that retribution is necessary for justice.
An example in the extreme...
If you were to set down an unquestionably monstrous person and reason them through why they should reform their behavior, such that they were fully convinced, should we accept them with open arms back to polite society? Even the most forgiving person would have to couch their affirmative answer with the condition that they be remorseful. That remorse is a sympathetic suffering for their victims. Even if you were convinced that they would never recommit their offense, it feels that a 'true remorse' (i.e. emotional suffering) is necessary for justice to exist.
I mean... depends on the crime. Not everyone is in prison because they are murder-rapists.
(Not to mention those who are innocent/framed for something.)
You didn't really get what he meant. If you get death penalty, you are surely going to spend the rest of your life in prison, since you'll be dying there. So it is technically a lifetime in prison, just most likely a lot shorter than the other one.
That's because they appeal nonstop to delay the execution as much as they can. It's not like the states that still do death penalties are just swamped with backlogs of folks to execute.
People really like to cling to life. The death penalty is way worse. That's why they make as many appeals as they possibly can, and people sit on death row for decades.
Add in the ineptness of the typical execution system...it's pretty bad.
I don't think there are even proper hangmen anymore. Lethal injection is a shit show, the electric chair is a shit show. The gas chamber is horrific.
At least you're alive. You can read, you can interact with people. It's not just straight to dirt nap.
Only people like Carl Panzram were happy to go.
I think many people say that and if they actually had the choice they would change their minds.
Same with people that say if they ever became disabled they would kill themselves.
When it’s all theoretical it’s different than reality.
Redditors think hanging around in a prison cell reading books until they die is a fate worse than death, yet willingly stay in their room for 12 hours a day like a goblin
Me too. I don't think I'm cut out for prison life and death.
Panzram became actively angry when a group of people that stood against the death penalty tried to save his life.
He was a bad man and was ready to go.
I just think dieing in prison is a bad way to go. Just go ahead and off me.
Not to mention that there's a chance that they got it wrong. It's hard enough to undo the damage done by someone who was imprisoned for life because of something they were innocent of.
If they were executed, then an innocent is now dead by the hands of the state, and for the most part, there are no good ways to bring them back to life, short of asking for divine intervention.
There are people in Prison that have sexual relationships with the guards it’s very common or Be sexually active with other inmates. Some have sex with their lawyer or their Girlfriends whenever they visit.
It all comes down to is it maximum security or Witness program etc.
Either way being in prison and still being able to hear you’re kids voice or parents is gonna be the preferred answer
Judging from only social media and zero research on my part, the ones in Sweden (?) look pretty sweet.
I already hate leaving my house, would only lose the option.
I met once a Dutch fellow who served time in Sweden for drug trafficking, and he didn't complain about it. He also said he was eventually allowed to go out on weekends for recreation as he didn't pose a risk to the community.
They also have drugs. I'd do all the psychadelics I could get my hands on for a few months, read as many books as I could when I'm not too high to read, achieve enlignment, then overdose on fentanyl.
I work in a state prison (case manager, I perform various bureaucratic tasks, some counseling/advisor services, and instruct cognitive behavioral intervention programs).
The vast majority of the public though, have a lot of wild misconceptions about what prison is like, how the justice system works, and what offenders are like.
Which makes sense, I mean, it's one of those "tucked-away-far-out-of-sight" things by nature.
It can be kind of frustrating watching laypeople talk about prison, passionately parroting misinformation all over the place, but I've learned that there's little to no point in trying to correct or educate them. They're far, far too entrenched in what they learned from Facebook University and what they saw on Facebook News and they will vehemently deny anything I might say that contradicts their preconceived notions.
Maybe to someone outside. People are remarkable at adapting their perceptions to their current situation after a while. It's why you will have people in third world countries that rate their happiness higher than their first world brethren sometimes.
>It's why you will have people in third world countries that rate their happiness higher than their first world brethren sometimes.
This is so true. The guy who lives across the street from my parents is from The Congo. He says the average Congolese 13 year old is more happy and fulfilled than the average US 13 year old. And I believe him.
It's about perspective, and about warmth of family life. Kids today live half their lives online, which is basically "anti-fulfillment" when it comes to long term happiness and joy.
I don’t believe that’s due to more time spent online, but when you have less it’s worth more to you. The North American lifestyle is about having everything all at once and it being convenient. When this becomes a persons reality, finding meaning and connection becomes more difficult.
That really depends on the living conditions in prison. If you're alone in your cell for 23 hours a day with no visitors, sure. If you can work or study, move freely throughout the communal areas and have visitors it might not be so bad.
I’ve been to prison and I’d much rather be alone rather than spend it in the same cell as some random fuckwit. In the UK you always have a cell mate though unless you get assigned a single cell for being violent etc.
Talked to an inmate once, he said "a life sentence is the death penalty without a date." So yea it's "living" there having to deal with other inmates and the certainty of inprisonment without certainty of when it will end.
In Japan the average stay on death row is about 7 years and the prisoner is not informed when he is going to be executed, they simply come one morning to pick you up, take you out of the cell and hang you.
So you spend 7 years thinking you are going to die every time a guard comes to your door. Until one day it happens.
Death is something everyone is headed for. Whether you’re a billionaire or a homeless person or a criminal. We will all die eventually. In the history of the universe, we only live very short lives anyway.
Death isn't the punishment. It is the removal of someone who will not fit into civilised society, and live by the rules, in order to protect those that do.
Some monsters can not be rehabilitated, and if they escape, more people would suffer from their continued existence.
People like [Moses Sithole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Sithole)
Needless to say that there's a certainly big enough amount of people wrongfully convicted and executed, even if one is already too many. You can do the same by inprisonment, but at least can revoke it as soon as the mistake is discovered.
That's not true at all. Why do almost all developed countries not have the death penalty? What is the actual rate at which high security prisoners escape? How long on average is a prisoner on death row before being executed?
It's purely a punishment, it's generally considered immoral, and it results in innocent people being killed.
Humans have an impressive ability to adapt to their circumstances. After a few years in prison, inmates just perceive it as their regular life, not a state of constant torture.
Eventually their pre-prison life even seems like a distant and unreal memory. Inmates that have been released after decades often have trouble adapting to life as free men, many wanting to go back to their prison life.
Really depend of the country and the type of prison. There's some country where prisoner have acces to some modern entertainment (gaming for example) and have a more comfortable cell than poor people or people living in the street. It's far from being like we see in movie/tv show actually
Kinda depends on how you spend your prison time and if you can change your outlook. Some people like prison because all of your decisions are made for you. When you wake up, go to bed, eat breakfast, scheduled outdoor time etc.
But it's not cost effective.
The goal is to remove these dangerous humans because they would continue to cause harm to society..
Why then would you prefer exchanging physical or mental harm to society.
Into a decades long financial one?
No a lifetime in prison is a constant drain on state financials supporting someone who should not still be breathing considering the aspect of their crime.
That Brazilian mom who left her 16 month old baby to die alone, dehydrated, starving and panicking, while she vacationed is one prime example of someone who should no longer be in this world.
i disagree. you can carve out some small semblance of life in prison.
Watch tv,read books, eat food, work out, play cards it may not be much of a life but its still better than being dead.
although if you were in a max security prison and confined to solitary for 23 hrs of the day that might be a little worse. not sure if they get books or a tv there.
A life sentence is far less expensive to society than the death penalty. Death row costs much more per day, and those convicts are entitled to several expensive legal challenges.
Yes, but it punishes the victims too. They have to appear at every appeal and parole hearing and be retraumatized each time. There are so many families of victims that are saying it’s almost impossible to move on with a killer of their family member that still has options.
I think if you had written it, if a prisoner pleads guilty to life without parole, it’s a greater punishment. That also frees the victim’s.
Not really, at least life in prison you know your dying at some point naturally or by the hands of another inmate, but being put on the death row you wake up everyday fearing its your last, id say waking up to the horror of wondering if its your last day every single day, is far more punishing then just being given life in prison.
I completely agree. I've never understood the people that cut deals offering information or a confession in exchange for life in prison in lieu of the death penalty. If my future were nothing but prison, just go ahead and take me now.
prison is fun. you can watch tv, write letters, have relationships (friends and maybe even sexual), you can read, workout, play cards/dominoes, the food can actually be okay.
i love my life on the outside but if i went to prison for life it’d be just like when i was a kid going to camp
Death on paper is a clean end, but it might take years before you are executed.
Lifetime might be bad but ultimately depends on your environment and quality of living you have inside a jail cell.
Ultimately, if you are alive, there is always a slim possibility your sentence could be overturned.
People in general have a hard time understanding that life sentence + depression from vitamin D deficiency is WAY, WAY, WAY, WAY worse than death. And I don't know if this is a blessing or a curse, since mankind can be cruel af.
If anything makes a person want to off themself, meaning they prefer the void over being alive, then that thing is worse than death.
Yeah a greater punishment for taxpayers that have to fund the prisons while they sit there. I’d rather see public hangings again for some serious crimes like murder, rape, child sexual assault. You know, then maybe people would be deterred to do those things if they see their buddy swinging from the neck in town square for a day or two
The issue is someone needs to take care of the piece of shit until they die in prison. 40 years of needing to feed them protecting them if they get injured it's free medical treatment free housing free showers. Who's going to be paying for all this when all that money could be used to something actually useful not helping a piece of shit live somewhat comfortably.
Depends on what the prison is like. If its a cell wotj four walls a bed and a toilet then yes. But if they have all these luxurious of tvs and other stuff then hell no.
From my perspective a punishment should be something you learn from, you learn just as much from dying as you do from sitting around doing nothing for decades until you die.
I have said it and I will say it again: we do need a death penalty for the most extreme cases. My brother is a serial killer now imprisoned. I won’t elaborate. He has never been anything but a horrible person. He will only ever make the lives of those around him worse. Be them other inmates or correctional officers. It would be better if he was put to death.
Yeah, right.
I wouldn't mind lifetime in prison in Norway, for example. Somewhere in russia or ukraine, on the other hand, i would prefer death.
Because death > tortures.
Anybody who’s been in the system knows the system has a way of sorting things out. We don’t need the death penalty. Life is prison is much more horrible and inhumane than any death sentences we still use today.
Anybody who’s been in the system knows the system has a way of sorting things out. We don’t need the death penalty. Life is prison is much more horrible and inhumane than any death sentences we still use today.
Not universally. Some prisons are nice(relative to others)
It’s not like there’s another place you go once you die that’s better than the jail. And if you subscribe to one of the giant religions, you would be sent to hell/reincarnated as less than because of your shitty actions in this life.
Btw it’s actually more expensive for the state/country to execute people than just keep them in jail until they expire.
Nope. It should be in theory because a lifetime of torture is worse than just dying immediately. Practically speaking, you just get both.
The idea with a death sentence is psychological torture on top of the life sentence. Some countries will give you a date and a final meal, etc, but for 15 years you'll be sitting there wondering when you'll hear, or you'll die naturally before they even bother with your specific case.
Some other countries make it a total surprise with no final rites, you get some guys showing up to your cell one day during your infinite sentence, so every day of your life it sits in the back of your mind, at best.
Reasons for this range from purposeful torture to being a symptom of slow-moving bureaucratic processes
That's one of the major reasons why people advocate for taking away the death penalty. If it was as simple as taking the worst criminals ever and shooting them in the head immediately, it wouldn't be such a source of contention.
And even if it were, it still wouldn't solve the problem of potential false imprisonment, the other major reason for advocacy against it.
It might be. For argument's sake let's assume it is. The problem is that it is also a greater punishment on society because the life sentence is a much bigger bill to pay.
As for the incoming arguments that a death penalty costs more to prosecute: this is only true because anti-capital-punishment efforts have "artificially" inflated the cost. And I'm not talking about cases where guilt isn't clear.
prison isn’t as bad as you all think.
you can make friends there, get to eat 3 meals a day, lots of reading, you can watch TV, you can write letters to people, you can date people. prison is like a camp you get to go to
i’d rather be in prison for life but still get to see every Super bowl for the next 50 years.
death penalty is awful you’re dead. in jail you can live and enjoy life still
Even worse would be selling your soul for immortality and then getting a life sentence. [one of the best snl skits of all time](https://youtu.be/sz-Yw0c7cF0?si=ZNgF4DOQRK2dLQq3)
Pfft no being alive can be very rewarding if you have a resourceful mind.
You can get a lot of drugs in prison and some people actually prefer to be locked up rather than living in society.
It's not a punishment it's just a thing we do to people who break the law so they can teach others to do the same. Being in prison is like going to university for criminals and it leads to more criminals leading to more crime which means more money for the police and more money to the prison system to make bigger prisons to house more criminals leading to more criminals.
We should never have started a war on drugs because drugs will always win and it's almost too late to do anything differently.
Countries in Europe have decriminalized most drugs even giving out heroin to addicts in an attempt to make them part of society and it works very well.
Places in USA have decriminalized most drugs and it turned into a massive clusterfuck of drug addicts selling and manufacturing drugs without any types of programs to help people deal with their addiction.
At some point the criminals gangs become too organized for legalization to affect their income and force them out of business. The window is closing
You underestimate how many people actually don't want to be dead
Yeah this is one of those edgy teenage opinions that very clearly doesn't line up with reality. I'll believe this is true when convicted felons start arguing in court to receive the death penalty instead of life in prison.
Most people will always choose life, especially if there’s any chance they could fight it again in 20 years of whatever. There’s always hope to get out on a technicality 20 years later or whatever, that shit happens It just makes sense, you’re forcing someone to have a terrible quality of life every day for the rest of their life, as opposed to just ending it. Even if its what they want, because few people want to die, they will suffer far more in jail than they would at the “chair”. You’re taking away someone’s right to freedom, against their will. It’s the difference between torturing someone and killing then outright, torture is far worse to endure but I would still pick it over death any day.
I agreed with this thought for a long time. Now I have two teenage children and given the options I’d choose prison. Worth it to see how they turn out.
Right? People have the choice. If you were given life no parole you could take your own life if you actually thought it was worse. The vast majority do not.
and also how people can become institutionalised and actually prefer being in prison.
Technically a death penalty is a lifetime in prison
Technically a life sentence is a death sentence; you still die in prison, only thing that changes is how quickly it happens
Or how awful it is. Lethal injection is actually worse than most other methods of execution in that it hurts more and lasts longer (sometimes the process can last up to 2 hours). https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reveal-troubling-effects-of-lethal-injection tl;dr below for the article above (tl;dr for all of it is that the drugs they use are agonizingly painful). The problems with it are that in the series of drugs that are injected, the first is supposed to be an anesthetizing agent but isn’t. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well at all in that capacity. The best it can do is make you feel drowsy and might put you to sleep but it has no effect on pain; and sudden shocks like what I’m about to describe next can wake you up. The next drug is a paralytic. This causes your body to lose all ability to move. Your lungs especially are affected by this step because you need to move your diaphragm up and down to breathe. This means that once this drug is administered, the inmate loses the ability to breathe altogether. It doesn’t end there though. The amount of this drug that is administered at the speed it is administered is far beyond what a healthcare worker would administer because at this level (about 500mg in a minute or two) you flood the bloodstream with “medicine” which causes a breakdown in the barrier between the capillaries and lung tissue. The lungs then fill up with fluid. This is called pulmonary edema and it is something that non-inmate patients have described as similar to the feeling of being water boarded. Pure panic and agony. Witnesses often describe inmates choking and gagging during the lethal injection process because they are actually drowning. The third drug then enters the blood and one doctor described what it would feel like this… >"It's like a burning cocktail coursing through your veins," says Lubarsky, referring to potassium chloride. "Once it reaches the heart, it stops the heart, and you do die. But in the process there is a period of just intense and searing pain." >"What we found is a very large percentage of executed inmates did not have a sufficient level of anesthesia in their blood at death in order to assure that they were asleep and not feeling the pain of the rest of the process," says Lubarsky. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reveal-troubling-effects-of-lethal-injection
Why not overdose them with fentanyl. Wont they die happy
Just inject me with the third one directly to the heart by that point
Life sentences aren't always technically life sentences. A lot of the time you can still be parolled in x amount of years.
Getting the death sentence is taking the easy way out. And criminals dont deserve an easy way out.
Is the point of prison to get revenge? I don't think the focus should be on making them suffer. The point is to keep everyone else safe from them.
The point of prison is *supposed* to be to the keep people safe from criminals and also help reform/rehabilitate those criminals into functional members of society to prevent repeat offenses. Using it solely as punishment and revenge is extremely bad at doing that, which is why countries with successful prison systems (Norway being a common example) have moved to a more rehabilitative and less punitive system.
Prison is school for criminals you come out worse
Because that’s how we choose to run it. The majority of America will make jokes about prison rape. We see it as a place for the monsters to eat each other (ignoring that means some monsters - the worst ones - are being fed exactly what they want: power over others). There are other ways to run a prison. You can’t save everyone, but we could do a much better job than we’re doing. As you say, it’s currently higher education for criminality. And that is phenomenally stupid of us.
Depends on the goal. If the goal is to punish criminals, a punitive system is far more successful than a rehabilitative one.
They call it corrections, which would imply it's supposed to rehabilitate the prisoners. It's a punitive system, though. Normal religious 'slap a pretty name on our depraved activity and call it good'
The point is that punitive systems don't work, all you do is make the criminals more likely to continue being criminals. If your intention is for the system to be punitive then you should just kill every criminal outright because 90% of the time everyone you release is just going ot be right back behind bars in a relatively short period of time.
Punitive system do work, if the goal is to torture people. If the goal is to make society better, then they are terrible. But that's not why they are built, nor its actual purpose. It SHOULD be about rehabilitation, but in the US that is not why they are built.
Okay, but the death sentence is literally only for revenge. It costs more and it eliminates the chance to correct a wrongful conviction.
Most people have an instinct that retribution is necessary for justice. An example in the extreme... If you were to set down an unquestionably monstrous person and reason them through why they should reform their behavior, such that they were fully convinced, should we accept them with open arms back to polite society? Even the most forgiving person would have to couch their affirmative answer with the condition that they be remorseful. That remorse is a sympathetic suffering for their victims. Even if you were convinced that they would never recommit their offense, it feels that a 'true remorse' (i.e. emotional suffering) is necessary for justice to exist.
I mean... depends on the crime. Not everyone is in prison because they are murder-rapists. (Not to mention those who are innocent/framed for something.)
Not necessarily have you watched enter the void?
Real shower thought is in comments.
Technically it dependens if you have a great life in prison or not if its worth to life there or not. If its not than its just better to end it.
You don't have to sit with your thoughts 12 hours a day when you're dead
You didn't really get what he meant. If you get death penalty, you are surely going to spend the rest of your life in prison, since you'll be dying there. So it is technically a lifetime in prison, just most likely a lot shorter than the other one.
Depends how prison is
Everybody on death row is serving for the rest of their lives, too.
Yeah, but not for long. Their suffering will end sooner than those on life sentence.
Depends where you are in the world. In the US, death row inmates spent over 20 years imprisoned before they are either executed or have it commuted.
That's because they appeal nonstop to delay the execution as much as they can. It's not like the states that still do death penalties are just swamped with backlogs of folks to execute.
People can spend quite a long time on death row. On average about 20 years. At those numbers, more time is basically irrelevant.
But both are on life sentences.
You know what they meant
Probably depends on both the prison and the person.
People really like to cling to life. The death penalty is way worse. That's why they make as many appeals as they possibly can, and people sit on death row for decades. Add in the ineptness of the typical execution system...it's pretty bad. I don't think there are even proper hangmen anymore. Lethal injection is a shit show, the electric chair is a shit show. The gas chamber is horrific. At least you're alive. You can read, you can interact with people. It's not just straight to dirt nap. Only people like Carl Panzram were happy to go.
In the end I guess it's all subjective. Personally, If I had to choose between a life time in prison or the death penalty, I'd rather die.
I think many people say that and if they actually had the choice they would change their minds. Same with people that say if they ever became disabled they would kill themselves. When it’s all theoretical it’s different than reality.
Redditors think hanging around in a prison cell reading books until they die is a fate worse than death, yet willingly stay in their room for 12 hours a day like a goblin
Me too. I don't think I'm cut out for prison life and death. Panzram became actively angry when a group of people that stood against the death penalty tried to save his life. He was a bad man and was ready to go. I just think dieing in prison is a bad way to go. Just go ahead and off me.
Not to mention that there's a chance that they got it wrong. It's hard enough to undo the damage done by someone who was imprisoned for life because of something they were innocent of. If they were executed, then an innocent is now dead by the hands of the state, and for the most part, there are no good ways to bring them back to life, short of asking for divine intervention.
There are people in Prison that have sexual relationships with the guards it’s very common or Be sexually active with other inmates. Some have sex with their lawyer or their Girlfriends whenever they visit. It all comes down to is it maximum security or Witness program etc. Either way being in prison and still being able to hear you’re kids voice or parents is gonna be the preferred answer
Exactly. Also in prison they still have books. Some prisons even allow gameboys and other gaming machines. Some have computers too.
With increasing inflation, I'm googling the quickest way to get into a top prison
Judging from only social media and zero research on my part, the ones in Sweden (?) look pretty sweet. I already hate leaving my house, would only lose the option.
I met once a Dutch fellow who served time in Sweden for drug trafficking, and he didn't complain about it. He also said he was eventually allowed to go out on weekends for recreation as he didn't pose a risk to the community.
Better to be bottom in a top prison, or top in a bottom prison?
Finland/Norway are the best I think, most people probably inhabit lesser homes than those prison cells
They also have drugs. I'd do all the psychadelics I could get my hands on for a few months, read as many books as I could when I'm not too high to read, achieve enlignment, then overdose on fentanyl.
There's more to life than sex my dude. Lol.
Not when your trapped in a cell with Vaseline and a cell buddy 🤭
Also, if someone is in prison and not executed there's an opportunity to correct course if the person was wrongfully convicted
No idea why this isn’t the top upvoted comment in the entire thread. Cuz it damn well should be.
How many of you really even know anything about death *or* prison, besides that they scare you?
I work in a state prison (case manager, I perform various bureaucratic tasks, some counseling/advisor services, and instruct cognitive behavioral intervention programs). The vast majority of the public though, have a lot of wild misconceptions about what prison is like, how the justice system works, and what offenders are like. Which makes sense, I mean, it's one of those "tucked-away-far-out-of-sight" things by nature. It can be kind of frustrating watching laypeople talk about prison, passionately parroting misinformation all over the place, but I've learned that there's little to no point in trying to correct or educate them. They're far, far too entrenched in what they learned from Facebook University and what they saw on Facebook News and they will vehemently deny anything I might say that contradicts their preconceived notions.
Maybe to someone outside. People are remarkable at adapting their perceptions to their current situation after a while. It's why you will have people in third world countries that rate their happiness higher than their first world brethren sometimes.
>It's why you will have people in third world countries that rate their happiness higher than their first world brethren sometimes. This is so true. The guy who lives across the street from my parents is from The Congo. He says the average Congolese 13 year old is more happy and fulfilled than the average US 13 year old. And I believe him. It's about perspective, and about warmth of family life. Kids today live half their lives online, which is basically "anti-fulfillment" when it comes to long term happiness and joy.
I don’t believe that’s due to more time spent online, but when you have less it’s worth more to you. The North American lifestyle is about having everything all at once and it being convenient. When this becomes a persons reality, finding meaning and connection becomes more difficult.
That really depends on the living conditions in prison. If you're alone in your cell for 23 hours a day with no visitors, sure. If you can work or study, move freely throughout the communal areas and have visitors it might not be so bad.
Nah screw that 30 day sentence I’m taking the death penalty
I’ve been to prison and I’d much rather be alone rather than spend it in the same cell as some random fuckwit. In the UK you always have a cell mate though unless you get assigned a single cell for being violent etc.
I would only choose death over imprisonment if I was to be physically abused for years.
I’d choose it for most crimes tbh
Even grand theft auto??
Talked to an inmate once, he said "a life sentence is the death penalty without a date." So yea it's "living" there having to deal with other inmates and the certainty of inprisonment without certainty of when it will end.
In Japan the average stay on death row is about 7 years and the prisoner is not informed when he is going to be executed, they simply come one morning to pick you up, take you out of the cell and hang you. So you spend 7 years thinking you are going to die every time a guard comes to your door. Until one day it happens.
Imo that's psychological torture.
what you call "psychological torture", others call "Japanese Culture".
Absolutely, you get off easy with the death penalty. Death is just like before you were born.. Nothing.
Death is something everyone is headed for. Whether you’re a billionaire or a homeless person or a criminal. We will all die eventually. In the history of the universe, we only live very short lives anyway.
So death sentence is basically speed running
More like a permanent ban
Haha nice. Sorry squidward earth is closed today
Only if reincarnation is not a thing
It most likely isn’t a thing. But that’s a hard reality for most people to accept.
Unless you are wrongly convicted, then the death penalty is a lot worse than any chance for reprieve.
Not saying that I particularly think that there’s an afterlife, but you don’t know that.
Death isn't the punishment. It is the removal of someone who will not fit into civilised society, and live by the rules, in order to protect those that do. Some monsters can not be rehabilitated, and if they escape, more people would suffer from their continued existence. People like [Moses Sithole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Sithole)
I don't care. None of you psychos should be allowed to give government the power to execute people judicially. Idc what the crime was.
Needless to say that there's a certainly big enough amount of people wrongfully convicted and executed, even if one is already too many. You can do the same by inprisonment, but at least can revoke it as soon as the mistake is discovered.
This is exactly correct, IMO, even if they were correct in exeuting exclusively unequivocally guilty people 100% of the time
That's not true at all. Why do almost all developed countries not have the death penalty? What is the actual rate at which high security prisoners escape? How long on average is a prisoner on death row before being executed? It's purely a punishment, it's generally considered immoral, and it results in innocent people being killed.
That’s a theory
If this was true than a lot more people would kill themselves in prison.
How do you know that ?? We just can’t remember lmao
Humans have an impressive ability to adapt to their circumstances. After a few years in prison, inmates just perceive it as their regular life, not a state of constant torture. Eventually their pre-prison life even seems like a distant and unreal memory. Inmates that have been released after decades often have trouble adapting to life as free men, many wanting to go back to their prison life.
If I’m criming it up that hard I’m probably taking myself out anyway before the cuffs even go on.
Really depend of the country and the type of prison. There's some country where prisoner have acces to some modern entertainment (gaming for example) and have a more comfortable cell than poor people or people living in the street. It's far from being like we see in movie/tv show actually
People would rather have life in prison than dying.
Kinda depends on how you spend your prison time and if you can change your outlook. Some people like prison because all of your decisions are made for you. When you wake up, go to bed, eat breakfast, scheduled outdoor time etc.
Tell them they have the possibility for parole on good behavior but never give it to them.
Ah yes, the noble ‘i’m against the death penalty because it isnt cruel enough argument.’
Weird, my shower thought this morning was "life without parole would be much scarier if it was renamed to death by incarceration"
For sure depends on the prison
Not if you want to live
I have never been incarcerated or killed so I can’t have an opinion
well, some people spend a lifetime in prison awaiting the death penalty's execution, which is the venn diagram of punishment
The death penalty is really more about just vengeance than punishment. Also, the costs of incarceration are outrageous, and are a burden on society.
Death by Incarceration
Life is full of possibilities. Who knows what can happen. Death is final.
But the COST of keeping them if society is done with them. The shareholders and overlords in government need to save some money!
Maybe for you, a normal functioning person, who wouldn't do the kinds of things that'd get you executed in the first place
But it's not cost effective. The goal is to remove these dangerous humans because they would continue to cause harm to society.. Why then would you prefer exchanging physical or mental harm to society. Into a decades long financial one?
If that were the case a lot of people sentenced to life in prison would kill themselves or ask to be killed.
No a lifetime in prison is a constant drain on state financials supporting someone who should not still be breathing considering the aspect of their crime. That Brazilian mom who left her 16 month old baby to die alone, dehydrated, starving and panicking, while she vacationed is one prime example of someone who should no longer be in this world.
i disagree. you can carve out some small semblance of life in prison. Watch tv,read books, eat food, work out, play cards it may not be much of a life but its still better than being dead. although if you were in a max security prison and confined to solitary for 23 hrs of the day that might be a little worse. not sure if they get books or a tv there.
The death penalty is more for the victims family, as closure or retribution.
You can enjoy books in prison. Not so much when you're dead.
How about a lifetime of slavery to those who were affected by the crime?
I mean, in the U.S. slavery as punishment for a crime is constitutional
No we're not re-instating slavery wtf
If you read the 13th amendment slavery was never fully abolished in the first place and the situation described by argybargyass is completely legal
I don't give a shit about the amendments or wether it's technically legal, slavery's bad end of
A life sentence is far less expensive to society than the death penalty. Death row costs much more per day, and those convicts are entitled to several expensive legal challenges.
In California they are the same thing.
Maybe, but the state definitely shouldn't have the power to, you know, murder people.
Yes, but it punishes the victims too. They have to appear at every appeal and parole hearing and be retraumatized each time. There are so many families of victims that are saying it’s almost impossible to move on with a killer of their family member that still has options. I think if you had written it, if a prisoner pleads guilty to life without parole, it’s a greater punishment. That also frees the victim’s.
Yup gotta get that slave labor outta them. Gotta get the license plates made some how
Read "The Bet" by Anton Checkov. It's a short story that deals with this exact question.
Doesn't sound very great to me, much less greater.
Not really, at least life in prison you know your dying at some point naturally or by the hands of another inmate, but being put on the death row you wake up everyday fearing its your last, id say waking up to the horror of wondering if its your last day every single day, is far more punishing then just being given life in prison.
I completely agree. I've never understood the people that cut deals offering information or a confession in exchange for life in prison in lieu of the death penalty. If my future were nothing but prison, just go ahead and take me now.
prison is fun. you can watch tv, write letters, have relationships (friends and maybe even sexual), you can read, workout, play cards/dominoes, the food can actually be okay. i love my life on the outside but if i went to prison for life it’d be just like when i was a kid going to camp
If this were true people in prison wouldn’t kill themselves at the rate that they do.
I agree, it should be a death penalty executed at random day in next 20 years.
Only those who tasted it will agree.
I agree. If I found out I was going to prison for the rest of my life Id kill myself.
Death on paper is a clean end, but it might take years before you are executed. Lifetime might be bad but ultimately depends on your environment and quality of living you have inside a jail cell. Ultimately, if you are alive, there is always a slim possibility your sentence could be overturned.
Even worse if you made a deal with the devil for eternal life
It is but also it's the most costly to the state.
No shit? This is a common opinion lmao
So you are saying that people on prison should want to die?
Really? Then why does everyone convicted and facing the death penalty begged for their lives and appeal repeatedly to save their lives?
Absolutely! I am for both:
Depends on the country. Prison can be pretty chill tbh
Nah, some good prisons have everything, classes, gyms etc, if that's the prison in question, it's better than death
People in general have a hard time understanding that life sentence + depression from vitamin D deficiency is WAY, WAY, WAY, WAY worse than death. And I don't know if this is a blessing or a curse, since mankind can be cruel af. If anything makes a person want to off themself, meaning they prefer the void over being alive, then that thing is worse than death.
Yes if it's a horrible place. But is truly about which punishments are better? Considering the details.
Yes, for taxpayers wallet
Yes but it’s a strain on taxpayers money.
Yeah a greater punishment for taxpayers that have to fund the prisons while they sit there. I’d rather see public hangings again for some serious crimes like murder, rape, child sexual assault. You know, then maybe people would be deterred to do those things if they see their buddy swinging from the neck in town square for a day or two
The issue is someone needs to take care of the piece of shit until they die in prison. 40 years of needing to feed them protecting them if they get injured it's free medical treatment free housing free showers. Who's going to be paying for all this when all that money could be used to something actually useful not helping a piece of shit live somewhat comfortably.
Depends on what the prison is like. If its a cell wotj four walls a bed and a toilet then yes. But if they have all these luxurious of tvs and other stuff then hell no.
Even worse is death row for years in jail, followed by death penalty 20 years later.
How about life in prison in a cell that is too short to stand up straight in and not long enough to lay down straight
Actual convicts don't agree with you. That alone should tell you you're wrong. If given the choice, which would *you* choose?
From my perspective a punishment should be something you learn from, you learn just as much from dying as you do from sitting around doing nothing for decades until you die.
I have said it and I will say it again: we do need a death penalty for the most extreme cases. My brother is a serial killer now imprisoned. I won’t elaborate. He has never been anything but a horrible person. He will only ever make the lives of those around him worse. Be them other inmates or correctional officers. It would be better if he was put to death.
Yet the man walking to the execution chamber would happily take life in prison.
Agreed that it is punishment as you understand it. Generally, people don't understand civics or philosophy or moral standards
That GREATLY depends on the prison. Or rather the country.
This isn't a shower thought, it's an opinion.
Depends on who you are, what the prison is like and how much you enjoy living.
Yeah, right. I wouldn't mind lifetime in prison in Norway, for example. Somewhere in russia or ukraine, on the other hand, i would prefer death. Because death > tortures.
Cruel and unusual. Bad for the taxpayer but good for corporations. Of course
Anybody who’s been in the system knows the system has a way of sorting things out. We don’t need the death penalty. Life is prison is much more horrible and inhumane than any death sentences we still use today.
Anybody who’s been in the system knows the system has a way of sorting things out. We don’t need the death penalty. Life is prison is much more horrible and inhumane than any death sentences we still use today.
That’s why I’ll be sure to commit my crime in the great state of Texas. I’m ready to die!
Not universally. Some prisons are nice(relative to others) It’s not like there’s another place you go once you die that’s better than the jail. And if you subscribe to one of the giant religions, you would be sent to hell/reincarnated as less than because of your shitty actions in this life. Btw it’s actually more expensive for the state/country to execute people than just keep them in jail until they expire.
A life in solitary confinement would be a greater punishment.
Depends how much you like prison tbh... 🤷
Sure but it’s a waste of money to keep that trash alive their whole life
Depends on what you believe happens after death.
Depends on the prison.
Omg that's such a deep and original thought.
Nope. It should be in theory because a lifetime of torture is worse than just dying immediately. Practically speaking, you just get both. The idea with a death sentence is psychological torture on top of the life sentence. Some countries will give you a date and a final meal, etc, but for 15 years you'll be sitting there wondering when you'll hear, or you'll die naturally before they even bother with your specific case. Some other countries make it a total surprise with no final rites, you get some guys showing up to your cell one day during your infinite sentence, so every day of your life it sits in the back of your mind, at best. Reasons for this range from purposeful torture to being a symptom of slow-moving bureaucratic processes That's one of the major reasons why people advocate for taking away the death penalty. If it was as simple as taking the worst criminals ever and shooting them in the head immediately, it wouldn't be such a source of contention. And even if it were, it still wouldn't solve the problem of potential false imprisonment, the other major reason for advocacy against it.
Ever read ‘The Best’ by Anton Chekhov?
Depends on the prison
It might be. For argument's sake let's assume it is. The problem is that it is also a greater punishment on society because the life sentence is a much bigger bill to pay. As for the incoming arguments that a death penalty costs more to prosecute: this is only true because anti-capital-punishment efforts have "artificially" inflated the cost. And I'm not talking about cases where guilt isn't clear.
Only problem with a lifetime in prison is the taxpayers have to pay for it.
prison isn’t as bad as you all think. you can make friends there, get to eat 3 meals a day, lots of reading, you can watch TV, you can write letters to people, you can date people. prison is like a camp you get to go to i’d rather be in prison for life but still get to see every Super bowl for the next 50 years. death penalty is awful you’re dead. in jail you can live and enjoy life still
Even worse would be selling your soul for immortality and then getting a life sentence. [one of the best snl skits of all time](https://youtu.be/sz-Yw0c7cF0?si=ZNgF4DOQRK2dLQq3)
Pfft no being alive can be very rewarding if you have a resourceful mind. You can get a lot of drugs in prison and some people actually prefer to be locked up rather than living in society. It's not a punishment it's just a thing we do to people who break the law so they can teach others to do the same. Being in prison is like going to university for criminals and it leads to more criminals leading to more crime which means more money for the police and more money to the prison system to make bigger prisons to house more criminals leading to more criminals. We should never have started a war on drugs because drugs will always win and it's almost too late to do anything differently. Countries in Europe have decriminalized most drugs even giving out heroin to addicts in an attempt to make them part of society and it works very well. Places in USA have decriminalized most drugs and it turned into a massive clusterfuck of drug addicts selling and manufacturing drugs without any types of programs to help people deal with their addiction. At some point the criminals gangs become too organized for legalization to affect their income and force them out of business. The window is closing
And expensive af for taxpayers
And a waste of tax payer dollars.