I have a question. Is the purpose of punishment the idea that the guilty must suffer? What suffering do they do if they are put to death? Isn’t it far more cruel to lock them in a cell and essentially forget about them? The taking of a life is most serious. It requires that we question everything. So when a death sentence is handed down, the convicted gets many automatic appeals. This is why it takes twenty years or more, before the sentence is carried out. If it ever is.
Yet, when you sentence someone to life without parole, no automatic appeals, no one spends years, or decades at the taxpayers expense to review, question, and pick all the little things apart to prove that the conclusion was made in error. Yet, the very idea of just putting the convicted in a cell and forgetting about them is apparently soft.
I’ve never understood that. The worst part of captivity according to POW’s is the indeterminate nature. It could last forever. Every day you wake up, you know it will be like yesterday, or the day before. It will be just like tomorrow in reality. How long will your family show up to chat with you? If your time is short, they’ll make the effort, but in time they’ll skip a day because of a Soccer game, or a wedding, or something. In time, they’ll have lives that revolve around something else, even your family forgets about you.
It is cheaper in the long run to do this. It is cheaper in the long run to just put the person in the hole and forget about them. Because you aren’t paying both sides of the legal argument.
Imagine it, every day you wake, it is to the noise and hostility of the prisons. Every day you wake up, you are one day closer to death, which is your own hope of ever leaving the prison. Pain and despair become your world, no hope, no one cares, and no one will ever care. Isn’t that worse? Isn’t that worse in reality?
Every day you die a little, and every day your hope of anything but the hell you live in dies a little. If you get angry and lash out at the hoplessness, you end up in solitary, with even the minimal pleasures of a book, or companionship denied you. Every moment, you have to be on guard for your life, because pain is all you have. Psychological, or physical. That is worse isn’t it? It is a far more cruel punishment than death. It is sending the offender off to irrelevance and loneliness.
