@PMSFKS #143806
I know I likely differ from most people here in that I find life without parole is a pointless cruelty and genuinely think a swift execution would be a mercy by comparison. Life without parole is a declaration that a prisoner will never be willing or able to reform and is a danger to everyone they interact with. Not just the people on the outside or direct victims of violence they commit, but those serving time with some chance to return can be drawn into their twisted mentality much like a cult. That's no idle comparison, the worst of the worst inexplicably draw others to them and they show religious devotion. For humane imprisonment human contact is a bare minimum, but human contact for the kind of people beyond all hope of rehabilitation is just another opportunity to hurt others for their own satisfaction. A petty thief might get enamored with the notoriety of an infamous cartel boss or other figure who might give them an "in" to organized crime or resonate with the self-serving cynicism of a gang enforcer who sees a world where only the power to protect your own interests actually matters and the law is an illusion polite society throws up to fake they're any different or the base delusions of grandeur of serial rapists or even get drawn into the far fringes of terrorism and incels.
So it's down to a choice of A) Giving such people a chance to continue doing harm convincing nonviolent offenders to escalate which undermines the reason for removing them from society as they still manage to be a danger from their cells. B) Treating them inhumanely by completely severing all contact which for the Joker wannabes is handing them a philosophical victory and making human rights subjective, conditional, or a matter of us-vs-them. C) Or execution, which solves both those problems and doesn't draw it out over decades of despair.
There is always the danger of putting an innocent to death by mistake but I have to ask: Does it do any less harm to an innocent wrongly convicted to spend a lifetime treated as less than human, away from hope, steeping in the views of criminals who would love to twist the knife that innocence is no protection in a dog eat dog world each passing year their self-serving views making more sense? For their only safety to potentially be association, supplication, or even worse with violent factions within the prison population? Are they themselves when they get out? Isn't it preferable to die as yourself than gradually have your identity changed by unrepentant monsters to survive in their midst? I would ask for that mercy in that position, but that's me.
Less of a problem with the no-hopers removed I would think, especially if death is decided on not by the severity of the charge itself - even a killer can find redemption - but an assessment of the prisoner's capacity to rehabilitate and it seems less of an inescapable truth that all prisoners have to harden themselves to survive. Ignoring the try-hards would be simpler than the genuinely dangerous and charismatic permanent fixtures, if correction facilities do their jobs properly avoiding those elements would reflect positively in prisoner behavioural reviews, and a wrongly convicted individual might even be out sooner and safer than in the current prison environment. Might all be wishful thinking, but it's how I look at it.
I don't know if I'm making a distinction without a difference by this qualification but I think it important to see a death sentence not as the punishment for a crime, a mere act of retaliation, but as the point all attempts at rehabilitation have failed.