Quote:
Originally Posted by Gemme
So what do you suggest? Locking the criminals up until they die? I'm genuinly curious what would be acceptable punishment for someone that has raped a child or murdered an innocent man because he took too long to serve him beer (going back to Nat's thread) or beat a woman to the point that she's now a vegetable and has very little, if any at all, brain function?
I hear what is unacceptable but what would be a better option?
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Yes, lock them up someplace where they will never again walk free. Keep them in a room where there is enough room for them stand up and lay down. Let their remaining years be a monotonous cycle of getting up, back breaking work, and food that sustains, and let the only thing they have to look forward to is the surety that the next day will contain only the same. Let this place be somewhere from which there is no possibility of escape.* Let them know that barring actual acquittal, they will never again be free and they will die in this prison, alone, nothing more than a number and an entry in a database. Let them know all of that.
You can only kill someone once. If you imprison them, however, you do that for every miserable and monotonous day that they live. Prison does not have to be medieval dungeon filled with the screams of the tortured to be a horrible place. You can create a prison that is filled with such sheer mind-numbing monotony, devoid of creativity in any form, that anyone who had to live in that environment, day after day, year after year, would come in short order to pray for death. If after a time, they wish to kill themselves either you let them or if you really believe that they should truly suffer, then medically intervene, going to whatever heroic efforts you think appropriate, to keep them alive. Let them live with whatever scars they leave themselves, but do not let them die. When, in the fullness of time, their body starts to break down their fate can be decided one of two ways. If, say, they have cancer let the disease take its course. Most forms of cancer, at the end-game, are horrible ways to go. If, on the other hand, they have a heart attack and, again, their suffering is something you relish revive them. Do not fix their heart, but do not let them die. So, for instance, if we are talking about someone who is arrested in their thirties they may be looking at another thirty, forty, possibly fifty years in prison. They have longed for death as the only possible surcease of the soul-killing, mind-numbing, unchanging, routine of monotony. And now, after decades of waiting they finally think that their meeting with Death has finally come and their one means of escape has opened up to them and you snatch it away.
You know what the most devious part of this is? You cannot even give them something to hate. This prison does not go out of its way to make the inmates lives miserable. No one is tortured, not in any conventional sense of the term. But they are cut off from the things that make us human. They need no books or exercise. They need no facilitation of their religion. They need no visitors, no contact with the outside world except their lawyers if some new evidence comes to light. The guards in this prison would, as far as possible, be removed from them so that the prisoners do not even have that contact. There are no recreation facilities, no sports. No art. No music. No games. No cards. No cigarettes. If it is not absolutely required to maintain metabolic functions at a nominal capacity, it is forbidden. I am not talking about an evil place, I am talking about a place that is it to be absolutely and completely
impersonal. They will never again feel anything like human warmth.
The prison I am talking about is like exile but without even the hope that you could find another tribe.
If someone does something inhuman, let them live out the rest of their days under conditions that are as far removed from human as is possible. If it were ever possible to completely automate the place so that there need not be human guards *inside* the facility (while still being outside to prevent anyone from escaping) all the better.
Whatever you might want to say about me, having sympathy for the worst of criminals is not it.
*(If lifting out of the gravity well ever becomes inexpensive, I would suggest putting prisons on the moon. There is no possibility of escape, any attempt would bring the absolute certainty of death one way or another--where can you run? )
Cheers
Aj