There is no doubt that having a happy populace is a better protection against violent crime than violent punishments. Whether a happy populace and violent punishments *together* do an even better job is another question, but extreme punishments will tend to lead to a a less happy populace (via various indirect, systemic effects) which will then tend to lead to more crime, violent and otherwise, and it’s this somewhat vague, but inevitable progression that conservative minds have trouble dealing with.

The thing I have very little idea about is whether a happier populace will result, in the long term, from the LWPOP process, or the Death Row process, both, or neither, being part of the justice system.

The main point I wanted to make is that although both the DP and LWPOP are overused in todays America, the over-use of LWPOP gets very little coverage vs Torture or the Death Penalty, despite being, for some people at least, just as bad as the other two.

BTW I don’t think my INTP defense of “I don’t have enough facts, nor enough time to find the facts, so I’ve decided to avoid the question” is actually a very good political strategy. I’d make a lousy politician. Much more politically viable would be to say “I’ll get back to you on that” whether or not I actually intended to.

I’m not saying that it would make sense for trivial crimes to have extreme sentences either.

As for the INTP defense, sure…that’s great if you’re trying to appear as a career politician.

Punishments certainly *can* be both cruel and commonplace, and they certainly *were* in the dark ages. If you *really* want to experience the dark ages, I recommend emmigrating to rural Afghanistan, but personally I prefer more enlightened societies.

Furthermore, you suggest that the violent “punishments” you propose will actually dissuade violent crime. Quite apart from the fact that such punishments are undoubtably violent and arguably criminal acts in their own right, there is no evidence that they reduce the amount of violent, criminal acts by non-state actors in a society. If you bothered to do the research you would discover the correlation tends to run the other way.

Having said all that I do wonder what my position is on death sentence vs lock them up forever. Both are extreme penalties that should only be used on the very worst recidivists, but I’m not sure I’m ready to say that they should never be used, or that one is better than the other. I’m going to use the INTP defense and say “more careful study and analysis is required to draw a justifiable conclusion than I am actually prepared to put in right now”.

If you want to get conservative and dissuade violent crime, lob off their heads and put in on a stick in the town center. Put people back in the stockades. The punishment isn’t ‘cruel and unusual’ if it is ‘commonplace and ordinary’. Shunning and shame used to be a pretty darn good deterrent to all sorts of crimes. Sadly we’ve become a soft society, accepting all sorts of people and their perverse lifestyle choices.

You may want a ‘decent and humane’ society, but I’ll settle for one that is merely law abiding on a simple set of laws.

In practice I guess it’s just the fact that most jail sentences in the USA are way too long – if you don’t get a good lawyer – and this is just the far end of the curve.

These big moral questions are never as simple as we’d like. Maybe PD/LWPOP *is* the best decision in a small number of cases, and it’s just over-used in certain places due to the perverse incentives created by a private prisons industry with a lot of cash to spend on shaping public (and hence, political) opinion.

Admittedly it seems to be a sentence applied to recidivist paedophiles, and intractable repeat offenders like Graeme Burton rather than first-offence murderers, but we have it in NZ nonetheless.