Spun off from this thread.
Our rationale as a society, both for executions and the presently brutal nature of American prisons, is that criminals need to be made examples of to scare everyone else out of committing crimes. One rebuttal to this argument is to say DP states have more crime than non-DP states; a notion that makes no distinction between cause and effect. A slightly better argument; used by opponents of the death penalty and proponents of making prisons harsher alike; is that many would-be criminals are already living in fear, and have little to lose from being executed and/or need more to lose from being incarcerated.
Firstly, this in my view should emphasize further the need to better address the root causes of crime. But that's a long-term goal, and still leaves behind the question of how to keep crime from getting out of control in the meantime.
That said, not all criminals are living in fear. Wealthy criminals; and/or white-collar criminals; have a cushy life on the outside; and often, rightly or wrongly; expect to continue to have one on the inside even if they get caught. Capone's cell is described by Cracked as "nicer than the average dorm room." Jordan Belfort had an easy time of prison after a lifetime spent doing nothing but scamming his own clients for a living, because he lived in a place where "everything is for sale." And then we wonder how stock fraud still keeps happening. How is prison supposed to make the wealthy fear the law, if enough wealthy people get off lightly that any wealthy criminal thinks getting caught is no big deal?
To cap it off, while the trend appears to be the cushiness of your prison sentence is proportional to your wealth, a number of would-be criminals, including middle class ones, seem to interpret the possibility of a cushy prison sentence as extending to them. Let one prisoner get a cushy sentence and they think they all will. Beyond Scared Straight shows a number of teenagers either shocked; or pretending to be shocked; by what they see in prison. Don't cops typically talk about prisons at middle school assemblies? Or was that scrapped in the name of modern hypersensitivity? If so, why don't they make the prisons themselves more humane for the same reason?
But prison vs. execution is not a difference of degree, but a difference of kind. So if one's likelihood to get executed depends on one's wealth, to what extent should it? Should it be a factor quantified along with the severity of the crime, with a threshold between prison-worthy crimes and execution-worthy ones? Or should it depend only on the crime itself, with an "all are equal in death" approach to making sure wealthy criminals are as deterred as everyone else; no more, no less?
Conversely, one way execution is more humane than prison is that if a prisoner WANTS to die, execution gives him plausible deniability on wanting to die, whereas suicide or death-seeking behaviours might humiliate him further by allowing his friends and family to find out he died on purpose.
Last but not least, what of the ex-convicts? No businessperson wants to hire someone with a criminal record; and since they're competing to meet consumer demand, this implies no customer will trust them. We could have the public sector keep them working in a halfway house anyway making reflectors for thermal-solar power, (it's a fairly simple process, with few ill effects to them or others for getting it wrong) which could keep them productive, rather than having to choose between coercing the private sector into hiring them and leaving them with a "steal or starve" choice of their own. The efficacy of solar collectors is 8th grade level science, so there's no reason to fear any supposed effects of sabotaging them.
All things considered, with all the things most people in prison go through; both during their sentence and after; it feels like hollow, empty virtue signaling to oppose their executions. But for the few whose prison sentences aren't hell on Earth, how exactly are we supposed to deter others from repeating their crimes?
